Whether you’re a superhero on a mission or have just misplaced your cellphone, finding a public phone booth these days is becoming more difficult on the streets of many Canadian cities and towns.

The growing ubiquity of cellphones and other wireless devices, combined with declining use of payphones among Canadians and attendant sagging revenue, are helping drive down the number of public landlines on the street. And while leading telecoms including Telus and Bell Canada say they’re keeping as many phones in service as is economically feasible, some consumer groups worry that phone access for lower-income Canadians and other users may be at risk.

“We’ve always maintained that where the phone has sufficient usage, we plan to leave it there. When the usage drops so low that almost nobody is using it, it’s probably not required at that location,” says Brian Amonson, director of public access for Burnaby-based Telus.

Telus owns and operates 35,342 public payphones in Alberta and B.C., and says between 1999 and 2002, payphone revenue in those provinces declined about 27 per cent, with the number of calls placed from them dropping by about 7.2 per cent.

Telecom companies say the number of payphones is declining slower than demand.

Bell Canada, which owns 88,700 payphones across the country, down from about 100,000 in 1999, reports that it will continue cutting about 2.5 per cent of its terminals each year, also citing increasing cellphone use and dropping revenue – about 30 per cent from 1999 to 2002. (Bell would not disclose the number of terminals it operates in Western Canada, citing competitive reasons.)

“The payphone business is driven by demand. When there’s demand in the market, payphones remain in place, but when there’s no demand then we adjust the numbers in consequence,” says Bell spokesperson France Poulin.

But, Poulin adds, “the number of payphones in service has definitely not declined at the same rate as the demand itself.”

Telus and Bell are among the phone service providers who have made submissions to the Canadian Radio- television and Telecommunications Commission – the federal agency that regulates phone companies – which is now examining whether it should compel industry to provide so-called public interest pay telephones. A CRTC spokesperson said last week that a decision is pending on the issue. In one of its presentations to the CRTC, Telus said the average annual net number of pay telephones removed from 1999 to 2002 was 662, representing only 1.79 per cent of the average total base of pay telephones in the company’s territory. The number of removals, the company argued, was “insignificant” in comparison to the decline in usage as measured by revenue and call counts.

“In a lot of cases where there’s a multi-set location, we’re moving one of three that may be there. So although there are fewer phones, there are still phones at many of those locations,” Amonson says.

Telus says it may remove or relocate phones for other reasons, including recurrent vandalism or special requests by community groups, business owners or police. In many cases, a single phone in a multi-set location may be removed.

Some consumer groups, however, fear that fewer available public phones are endangering a critical public service, citing surveys showing while just 49 per cent of Canadians use payphones at least occasionally, about 88 per cent of low-income users do, mostly using coins to make their calls.

In its CRTC submission, the non-profit Ottawa-based Public Interest Advocacy Centre says some kind of regulatory intervention is called for in order to ensure payphones are provided in locations where needed.

Telus spokesperson Charlie Fleet says if the CRTC determines that phone companies are required to maintain unprofitable phones in the public’s interest, the company will likely seek compensation or some form of cost-recovery. However, Telus believes that a mandated regulatory regime will prove more costly and cumbersome than is necessary to satisfy the payphone users.

Poulin said Bell is continuing to explore and expand new technologies, including WiFi-based hotspots piggybacked onto existing payphone infrastructure, while still maintaining traditional payphone service.

“We’re going to see a combination of technologies to meet the newer needs of a more mobile population,” she says.

“The payphones will remain. However, it’s important to manage them and ensure it remains a viable business.”

In the meantime, Amonson says, there’s little risk of payphones going the way of the dodo. “We’ve been seeing a relatively steady decline in usage,” he says.

“In the past few months, it seems to have slowed somewhat. And I believe that at some point we’ll reach a level where it will flatten out, because there’s always a certain amount of travellers or people who don’t have or don’t want a cellphone.”