Recently, a rumor has been circulating on social media about the color change in certain traffic lights in the United States. Like most viral news stories, this rumor originated in a Reddit post on April 6, 2025. It was in the r/AskAnAmerican subforum, and someone—probably trying to be funny a week after April Fools’ Day—innocently asked the following question: “Is it true that some American traffic lights in patriotic states are red, white, and blue?”
Redditors were quick to respond: while most pointed out that he was a few days late to the party, many others joked about how Donald Trump was going to change all the traffic lights to make us patriotic.
It was just a rumor that started as a joke on social media, but it has spread across social networks and other media outlets. This has led us to the following question: Are there traffic lights with red, white, and blue colors? Well, the truth is that the answer is not a resounding “no.” We’ll explain more below, along with the differences in traffic lights around the world.
Fourth of July traffic lights
Although the standard spectrum of red, yellow, and green traffic lights is standardized anywhere in the world with a standard traffic code, people have wondered if it would be possible to change the colors. The traffic code we are accustomed to is the culmination of more than 100 years of symbolism adapted so that it can be understood without needing to understand one language or another.
Traffic light colors are universal, as they help prevent chaos and collisions on the road, regardless of the driver’s native language. If traffic light colors changed when moving to a new location, drivers could end up having accidents due to misunderstandings.
In fact, the official colors of traffic lights were first dictated in 1935, when the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) was published. It was railway engineers who came up with this idea, and they officially established red, yellow, and green as the colors of traffic lights in the United States. Since then, this has been the accepted standard worldwide.
So why are there rumors that the colors are going to be changed to red, white, and blue? The curious thing is that there are certain arguments in favor of adding colors, or at least there are traffic lights around the world that use them slightly differently.
Adding white—or blue—to traffic lights
For several years now, the possibility of adding the color white to traffic lights has been under consideration. Not to make life more complicated for human drivers, but to be able to send distinctive signals to autonomous vehicles.
On the other hand, blue is used instead of green in many countries. This is the case in Japan, which historically has had many traffic lights with this color. This is due to a cultural and linguistic issue: in traditional Japanese, both blue and green are called by the same name, as they are considered to be in the same color range. When the traffic code was established and traffic lights began to be installed, the Japanese themselves ended up putting up many of them with colors that are obviously blue to Westerners. However, the Japanese have always seen these two colors as one (just as you would ask someone what the difference is between fuchsia and magenta, for example).
With the advent of autonomous driving and the increased presence of self-driving cars, we may see traffic lights in Japan with red, white, blue… and amber. But I think it will be a long time before we see traffic lights in these colors in the United States. The Trump administration may be very patriotic, but they are not going to spend billions of dollars changing absolutely all the colors of traffic lights across the country. Still, the news is good for a laugh.