The New York Yellow Cab: How It Got Its Colour, Its Meter and Its Fame

The New York cab predates the car in any form recognisable today. The first private taxi operation in the city began in 1897, when the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company put twelve electric hansom cabs on the streets. The fleet grew quickly and reached a thousand vehicles, which for an electric fleet in the 1890s is a figure worth pausing on.

It did not last. A fire destroyed a large part of the fleet, and the financial crisis of 1907 finished the company off. New Yorkers went back to horse-drawn carriages, and the electric taxi disappeared from the city for roughly a century.

The modern New York cab exists because a businessman was overcharged for a carriage ride. Harry N. Allen founded the New York Taxi Cab Company in response, and in 1907 imported sixty-five petrol cars from France. The imported feature that mattered was not the engine but the taximeter: a device that measured the distance travelled, so that the price stopped being a negotiation the passenger was structurally bound to lose.

The word followed the device. “Taxi” is the taximeter and “cab” is the cabriolet, the horse-drawn carriage the meter outlived, and the compound “taxicab” carries both halves of the history in it.

The colour was a separate decision and a practical one. The French cars arrived red and green; Allen repainted the fleet yellow so that a cab could be picked out at distance. Within a year the sixty-five cars had become seven hundred, and the horse-drawn carriage was finished as a commercial proposition in the city. Chicago followed with a recognisable yellow fleet of its own, and the mechanism travelled further than the paint: a metered rate is now set by ordinance in most American cities, and in 1908 Albert Rockwell founded a competing company in Connecticut whose cabs worked New York.

A fleet that grows from sixty-five vehicles to seven hundred inside a year does not stay unregulated for long. New York eventually capped the number of vehicles permitted to accept a street hail and attached that permission to a transferable licence, the medallion. Two things follow from a cap of that kind, and only one of them was intended.

The intended effect was order: a known number of vehicles, identifiable, answerable, and required to serve the whole city and not only its profitable parts. The unintended effect was that a licence in fixed supply, in a city with rising demand, behaves like an asset. Medallions were bought, sold, mortgaged and treated as retirement savings by the drivers who held them, which worked for as long as the supply constraint held.

It stopped holding when app-dispatched vehicles arrived, because a car summoned through an application is not accepting a street hail and therefore sits outside the cap entirely. The regulatory line that had defined the trade for decades turned out to describe a gesture – an arm raised at a kerb – and not the service itself. What the medallion had really been pricing was exclusivity, and the exclusivity was gone.

Almost every recognisable feature of the New York cab answers a specific complaint; none of it began as a styling decision. The colour answers visibility at distance. The roof light answers the question of whether a vehicle is available, from further away than a driver could signal. The partition answers driver safety. The meter answers pricing, and the receipt answers everything that goes wrong afterwards.

Read that way the cab is less a designed object than an accumulation of settlements, each one added after an argument. The same accretion is visible in any city’s current rules, which is why they read as lists of exceptions: each clause is there because something happened.

Chicago adopted a yellow fleet of its own soon after New York did, and the choice propagated widely enough that yellow reads as the default taxi colour across much of the United States. It was never universal. Cities settled on their own liveries for the same reason New York settled on yellow: whatever made a licensed vehicle distinguishable from an unlicensed one at a distance.

Colour is one of a family of identification devices that regulators have used, and it is the weakest of them. A paint scheme can be imitated. A vehicle number, a posted rate card and a printed receipt cannot be, which is why modern rules lean on those instead and treat livery as a supporting signal. Seattle’s rules require a company using its own meter schedule to post those rates on the exterior and interior of every affiliated vehicle – the same instinct as Allen’s paint, expressed as text.

A choice made for legibility at distance turned into something else entirely once film and television took hold. The yellow cab became shorthand for the city itself, to the point where people who have never visited New York recognise it instantly and expect it to be there.

The mechanism Allen imported travelled further than the colour did. Metered pricing spread city by city, and the argument for it has not changed since 1907: a meter converts a negotiation into a calculation. The device itself is older than the colour. Seattle’s current rate rule is the same idea with more clauses, setting a drop rate, a distance rate and a time rate that every licensed vehicle in the city and county runs identically.

Why are New York taxis yellow?

Harry N. Allen repainted his imported French cars yellow in 1907 so that a cab could be picked out at a distance. It was a visibility decision, not a branding one.

What does the word taxicab mean?

It is a compound: taxi from taximeter, the device that measures the distance travelled, and cab from cabriolet, the horse-drawn carriage the meter outlived.

What was the first taxi fleet in New York?

The Electric Carriage and Wagon Company, which put twelve electric hansom cabs on the streets in 1897 and grew to a thousand vehicles before a fire and the 1907 financial crisis ended it.

What is a medallion?

A transferable licence permitting a vehicle to accept a street hail, issued in fixed supply. Because the supply was capped and demand was not, it came to be traded as an asset until app-dispatched vehicles, which accept no street hail, moved outside the cap entirely.