Do You Know Why All School Buses Color is Kept Yellow? Read Here

Colours play a major role in day to day life. The wavelength and frequency of colour define its characteristics and its use in the human life. For instance, why red is used for danger or stop signal in the traffic light, why the sky looks blue and why school buses are painted yellow.

Why are school buses painted yellow only?

The reason why yellow is used to paint the school buses is already hinted in the above paragraph but we will still decode it down in case you missed it.

The game of wavelength and frequency

Red colour has the maximum wavelength (approximately 650 nm) among the various components of the white light. It does not scatter like the blue colour (which has relatively lower wavelength and thus disperses the maximum and gives a blue colour to the sky), and so is used to indicate danger and stop signal as it can be spotted from far away.

The yellow colour lies below the red colour and has lower wavelength than the red but higher than the blue as can be understood from the acronym VIBGYOR.

But why yellow colour on the school bus?

Although red colour catches the most attention, it has already been attributed to danger so the next most attentive colour - which can be distinguished in the crowd - yellow - is painted on the school bus.

Yellow colour can also be spotted even in the rain, fog and dew. Since the lateral peripheral vision of yellow is 1.24 times greater than the red colour, it is more visible than the red itself.

Even if a person is not looking straight, he can spot the yellow coloured school bus in front of him. That's why the school bus is painted yellow to lessen the possibility of an accident for the bus filled with children on the highway.