It’s easy to think that pay phones have gone the way of the extinct phone book.

Wait, what? Phone books were delivered across the Lower Mainland last week?

Yes, and thousands of pay phones remain in service around B.C.

Telus has roughly 12,000 in the province and Alberta (and a few in Quebec), and Bell also has pay phones in B.C.

Nationwide, there are about 55,000 pay phones, although hundreds of them can go unused for a year or more.

“In general, with the popularity of cellphone usage, there’s a declining trend in pay-phone use,” Liz Sauve, a spokeswoman for Telus, said. “Their numbers have come down significantly over the last 15 years. Usage, the number of calls, they’ve really declined.

“We have pay phones out there that go days and days without a call made on them.”

When the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission released its pay-phone study a year ago, Bell said it had 636 pay phones that hadn’t been used in the past 13 months and another 10,500 — 15 per cent of its total — that brought in revenue of less than 50 cents a day on average.

According to an industry study, a phone needs to be used about 100 times a month to break even.

“It costs about $5,000 to install a pay phone,” Sauve said. “That’s a lot of quarters.”

When a phone is removed, it’s usually because it’s been vandalized or the owner of the property, who splits any revenue 50-50 with Telus, wants it gone.

“Most of the time when Telus removes a pay phone, it’s because the landlord has requested its removal to put something more profitable in its space,” Sauve said.

The CRTC agrees.

Across Canada, 75 per cent of pay-phone removals are at the landlord’s request, according to the federal agency responsible for regulating phones.

Nowadays, you find pay phones in department stores and malls, at backpacker hostels and hotels, and in pubs, restaurants and liquor stores.

Hospitals, community centres and prisons have high pay-phone usage. They can be found at transportation hubs such as marinas, cruise-ship terminals and SkyTrain stations.

Colleges and universities are full of them: On the University of B.C. campus alone, there are 97.

They’re used by people who can’t afford cellphones (10 per cent of the population), by the elderly, the homeless, victims of abuse, rural residents with spotty cell coverage, First Nations communities, and in times of inconvenience and emergency, the CRTC found.

“A big reason to use pay phones (rather than a cellphone) is because of the very long wait to get through to government offices,” one worker at North Shore Community Resources in North Vancouver told Postmedia: “If one of my clients makes a call to a government office and has to wait 35 or 48 minutes, they can blow their entire phone budget while on hold.”

NO KIDDING: PAY PHONES STILL HAVE THEIR USE

You think phone booth, you think Superman.

But the phone booth is just a change room for the Man of Steel, making only a cameo appearance in the comics.

In the movies, however, a phone booth once co-starred in a feature film that had Hitchcockesqueovertones.

In Phone Booth, Colin Farrell’s adulterous character stands inside the booth for pretty much the whole 81 minutes of the movie, hostage to a sniper played by Kiefer Sutherland.

It sounds as lame as a premise can get, but the film is a gripping psychological cliffhanger.

Phone booths may be on the endangered list, but they can still be found around B.C., Telus says. They’re just not exactly sure where.

The volume of pay-phone calls is falling by roughly 25 per cent a year in Canada, according to the CRTC.

When the CRTC previously studied pay-phone use, in 2004, 50 per cent of Canadians said they occasionally used one. Last year’s report put that number at about 33 per cent.

A few countries have eliminated, or plan to eliminate, pay phones altogether, including Jordan, Belgium, Sweden and Finland, according to trade publications.

Because of their anonymity, pay phones can be associated with notoriety as well.

Last week, RCMP in Nova Scotia said a bomb threat, called in to WestJet at the Halifax airport, turned out to be a hoax originating from a gas-station pay phone 235 kilometres away in Digby, N.S.

Seventy passengers and crew were evacuated, all the luggage and cargo inspected and the plane searched.

That was an expensive 50-cent call.

A week before, police in Camrose, Alta., arrested a man as he was uttering threats over the phone when the call was traced to a pay phone outside a convenience store.

Despite anecdotal reports of pay phones being used for drug deals, however, there seems to be no evidence to suggest it’s a prevalent practice, at least in Vancouver.

“I’m not aware of a significant impact on the Vancouver drug trade due to pay phones,” Sgt. Randy Fincham of the Vancouver police said.

gordmcintyre@postmedia.com

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