Issue date: 10/4/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Chris Qian Campus pay phones are slowly becoming a thing of the past on campus and in society.

Where have all the pay phones gone?

So many people have cell phones that it seems hardly anyone has noticed that all of the pay phones but one have been removed from Chabot's campus.

For those without cell phones, you'd think this would be an inconvenience at best, but it could also affect those students who do have cell phones, especially in times of an emergency.
When you dial 911 from any land line, including pay phones, you are automatically connected to a dispatcher at the nearest PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point).

This means when calling from Chabot, you would be connected to Hayward Police.

When you call from a cell phone, your call is sent to a CHP (California Highway Patrol) dispatch center, which then redirects your call to your local PSAP.

The nearest CHP dispatch center to Chabot is the Golden Gate Communications Center in Vallejo, which fields calls to the CHP from the entire Bay Area as far north as Santa Rosa and as far south as San Jose.

Calling 911 from a cell phone when a land line is available can make a huge difference in the response time of emergency service personnel.

According to a study done over the summer by the Los Angeles Times, wait times for 911 calls in the Bay Area were averaging above 16 minutes in July of this year.

Don't get mad at Chabot though.

It wasn't the school's decision to get rid of the pay-phones.
An outside company that owns the phones decided that the phones were not generating enough revenue to stay where they were.

Unless Chabot could sign a contract guaranteeing the phones would make a certain amount of money, the company would not leave the phones on campus because it was not profitable for them.

According to Sgt. MacGreagor Wright, the resident police officer at Chabot, the company pulled pay phones from the lobby at the Hayward Police Department as well.

Right now, the only pay-phone on campus is in building 2300 but the Business Services office at Chabot is working on changing that.

The school is looking into getting new public phones on campus, which will be of much better quality and possibly TTY/TDD (Teletypewriter/ Telecommunications Device for the Deaf) accessible for the hearing impaired.

Continued...

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