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Jack Knox: In wireless world, callers hanging up on pay phones

Walking briskly through chilly Chinatown, my head bowed against the biting wind, I would have passed him without noticing had he not spoken: “Buddy, can you spare 50 cents?” I stopped and turned to the unmoving figure on the sidewalk: “Don’t you mean
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A woman on a cellphone walks past a pagoda-topped pay phone box at the corner of Fisgard and Government streets. The once-ubiquitous pay phones are a vanishing sight, as cellphones have nearly erased their need.

Jack Knox mugshot genericWalking briskly through chilly Chinatown, my head bowed against the biting wind, I would have passed him without noticing had he not spoken: “Buddy, can you spare 50 cents?”

I stopped and turned to the unmoving figure on the sidewalk: “Don’t you mean ‘a dime,’ like in the song?”

“No,” he replied. “It was a dime until 1984, when it became a quarter. Then it was raised to 50 cents in 2009, not that anyone noticed. Most people had cellphones by then.”

I peered closer. You don’t see many pay phones like him anymore, not in Canada, where we have almost as many cellular subscriptions (30 million) as people (35 million).

You certainly don’t see many full-length booths like this old-timer, one of two pagoda-topped phone boxes that sit sort of kitty-corner on Fisgard at Government.

“You must be starving,” I said, jamming a coin in his slot. He gulped it down greedily, emitting a series of happy clicks and dings. Canada’s telecommunications regulator says some pay phones can go months — even years — without being fed at all.

In consequence, they are vanishing both from public places (Telus has 10,000 pay phones in B.C. and Alberta today, compared with 37,000 in 1999) and from popular culture. No more Superman peeling down to his leotard or Tippi Hedren hiding in a booth to escape Alfred Hitchcock’s birds. No more cop shows with an impatient Starsky or Hutch ripping the handset away from a phone hog. No more David Letterman calling the phone on the street outside the Ed Sullivan Theater, live, and inviting whomever answered to be on his show.

Several years ago, people took to posting pictures of Victoria’s remaining pay phones online, but the website they used went dormant in 2010. A cruise around town last week found that some of the phones the site listed, such as the one at Head and Esquimalt and another at Sooke and Goldstream, have quietly faded away without a trace, just like Pogs or Michael Richards. Others have become Hillary Clinton, reduced to a gutted, empty shell.

One phone outside a row of funky little shops on Craigflower still works, but sits in a kiosk with more tags than a Boxing Week sale. Another in the Tillicum mall looked as lonely as Matt Damon in The Martian; a clerk in a nearby store said she actually did a double take when somebody used it the other day.

Pay phones are most commonly found in places like corner stores, hospitals and transportation hubs such as airports and bus depots.

They’re not that easy to find downtown, though, particularly outside. The Bay Centre has just one bank of five Bell phones left, tucked down a side corridor. There’s one in the downtown courthouse and two more in the central library branch.

“Oftentimes, it’s challenging for us to find an agreeable landlord to place a pay phone,” says Telus’s Liz Sauvé, whose company has 200 of the devices in Victoria.

“For example, business owners oftentimes ask us to remove a pay phone that is seldom used so that they can put something more profitable in its space, such as a new coffee bar.

“Over the past few years, we’ve received requests from the city, police and local businesses to remove certain phones which were either used very rarely, or perhaps attracted vandalism.”

Right, vandalism. There’s something about pay phones that brings out people’s inner drunken Bieber. Fixing them isn’t cheap, either, as it’s getting hard to find replacement parts.

In 2005, it was reported that one fifth of Vancouver Island’s 1,700 pay phones had been vandalized. There’s a provincial park in the Interior where a kiosk was trashed half a dozen times before Telus, having spent $30,000 fixing a phone that only burped out a few bucks worth of quarters each month, simply gave up.

That’s too bad, because such phones are still a lifeline to some. Low-income people need pay phones. So do those west of Sooke or north of Campbell River, where cell reception ranges from sketchy to non-existent. Telus has 135 pay phones on the north Island and another 18 between Sooke and Port Renfrew.

Traditionally, pay phones have been popular among drug dealers, too. Several years ago, to curb illicit activity, some downtown Victoria phones were “curfewed” so that they couldn’t be used between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. for anything except dialling 911 (which is free, by the way).

To most, though, the once-ubiquitous pay phone has become irrelevant. And when people don’t even notice you’re gone, you get shown no quarter(s).