Clark Kent would have trouble being Superman in today's society. He wouldn't have a place to change.
Gone from the streets of Metropolis are his changing rooms -- public telephone booths.
Instead, personal cell phones have taken over. Steadily the public phones that once stood for efficiency, accessibility and safety disappear from the city streets.
It seems even Superman can't save the pay-phone.
But in Maine and other states, maybe state legislatures can save them.
To preserve the functionality of pay-phones, Rep. Herbert Adams, D-Portland, has proposed legislation to place "public interest pay-phones" (PIPs) in areas designated a risk to residents' safety, health or welfare due to insufficient phone access, reports Sara Miller of The Christian Science Monitor.
Adams' bill requires pay-phone providers to alert the state before removing any public phones and allows citizens to request phones in places that would otherwise be unprofitable.
But on a college campus where most students are equipped with cell phones, pay-phones hardly seem necessary.
"I can't remember the last time I used a pay-phone," media productions sophomore Brian Martin said. "It was probably about two years ago after they changed the price from a quarter to 35 cents.
"I have a cell phone anyway. I never need to use a pay-phone."
But that's not the case for everyone.
While most of America has answered the call, 6.5 percent of American households are still without a telephone. These people rely on public phones for communication and often can't afford a monthly phone bill.
And public phones are also useful in areas without cellular reception (and to students with dead batteries, forgotten pin codes and lost phones). But mostly, pay-phones serve public safety.
In fact, public pay-phones are all over campus. In and around the Memorial Union alone, there are more than 10 public phones.
But the number of pay-phones in the United States continues to dwindle. The Federal Communications Commission reports the number of pay-phones across the country declined from 2.1 million in 1998 to 1.5 million just five years later in 2003.
In 1996, to promote competition and broaden pay-phone accessibility, Congress required that pay-phones no longer be regulated. Since then, states have been in charge of setting up and funding PIP programs.
But according to the FCC, pay-phones continue to wane, driven by a decline in revenue from $2.2 billion in 1999 to just half that amount in 2004.
There are some groups, though, who try to keep the pay-phone from extinction. Payphonedirectory.org and Payphone-project.com are just two Web sites dedicated to preserving the pay-phone.
Both independently run, the sites are essentially databases of public pay-phone numbers. Each has a map of the U.S. that can be pinpointed to a specific location with a listing of phone numbers in that area.
Yet the sites seem to be faltering as well. Most of the numbers are outdated and the two that came from ASU were both out of use.
So I thought I'd call and ask why nobody cared about public pay-phones anymore. I got the numbers of four or five pay-phones on campus and hours later, dialed the numbers.
But after thousands of empty rings, a man can only take so much.
After more than two hours of calls at three separate peak times, no one ever picked up the phone -- at least to talk to me. A few picked up just to hang up the phone and stop the ringing, but I never actually got an answer.
Maybe passers-by didn't know the phone was for them. Maybe they were all too busy to pick it up. Maybe no one even noticed.
If more efforts aren't made to preserve pay-phones, there may be nothing to notice at all.
Where's Superman when you need him?
Ty Thompson is a journalism sophomore. Reach him at (480) 967-9716. Or e-mail tyler.w.thompson@asu.edu.
