Highway emergency call boxes.

[rarnold]

Idaho Transportation Department has placed Emergency Phones along US 12 in Central Idaho. This road travel through the Clearwater National Forest, hugging the Lochsa River, and zero cell phone coverage. They are placed about 30 miles apart so you are never more than 15 miles from a phone. They even place a sign over the phone with coordinates to give to dispatch. It is a beautiful drive if you have never been, but it is very remote area.

[jeffandnicole]

15 miles? They should be a mile apart.  At 30 miles apart, how the heck do you know which one is closest? If you pass one, then break down 3 miles later, would someone walk ahead thinking the next one is just up the road a bit, not realizing it's another 27 miles away!!

[UCFKnights]

15 miles? They should be a mile apart.  At 30 miles apart, how the heck do you know which one is closest? If you pass one, then break down 3 miles later, would someone walk ahead thinking the next one is just up the road a bit, not realizing it's another 27 miles away!!

And then if one is out of order, you just gotta walk another 30 miles or another 10 hours to the next one!

[jakeroot]

15 miles doesn't seem like much when you're driving. But on foot? I work part time as a valet. I work 8-hour days. I'm not sure I've ever covered 15 miles walking/running in a shift.

[kalvado]

15 miles doesn't seem like much when you're driving. But on foot? I work part time as a valet. I work 8-hour days. I'm not sure I've ever covered 15 miles walking/running in a shift.

Depending on situation, 15 miles may be OK, or 1 mile may be too much.
If driver is OK and vehicle is driveable (e.g. minor accident), it is better to get help down the road.
If vehicle is not movable, but driver is OK - and out of cell service area -  it is about asking another car passing by to make a call (or getting a ride) - and 5 miles is as good  as 15 (although 15 is on a high side)
If driver got a problem (e.g. health) preventing them from operation, even 1 mile walk may not be an option.
If weather is a problem (e.g. car stuck in snow), it is better to stay with you car to begin with....

[jeffandnicole]

15 miles doesn't seem like much when you're driving. But on foot? I work part time as a valet. I work 8-hour days. I'm not sure I've ever covered 15 miles walking/running in a shift.

Depending on situation, 15 miles may be OK, or 1 mile may be too much.
If driver is OK and vehicle is driveable (e.g. minor accident), it is better to get help down the road.
If vehicle is not movable, but driver is OK - and out of cell service area -  it is about asking another car passing by to make a call (or getting a ride) - and 5 miles is as good  as 15 (although 15 is on a high side)
If driver got a problem (e.g. health) preventing them from operation, even 1 mile walk may not be an option.
If weather is a problem (e.g. car stuck in snow), it is better to stay with you car to begin with....

And since you shouldn't be backing up on a highway, if you're a mile past a call box, that means you have another 29 miles till the next one.

[jakeroot]

15 miles doesn't seem like much when you're driving. But on foot? I work part time as a valet. I work 8-hour days. I'm not sure I've ever covered 15 miles walking/running in a shift.

Depending on situation, 15 miles may be OK, or 1 mile may be too much.

Definitely. But (obviously) we don't know what kind of state the driver might be in at the time, so as a precaution, call boxes are typically placed much closer together, to keep an injured driver from having to walk too far. The 90 Floating Bridges in Seattle have call boxes about every 500 feet. This would seem to be an ideal minimum, but I wouldn't place any more than a mile apart. A mile takes about 20 minutes to cover if in normal condition. That's a long time if you're injured. 15 Miles? What's even the point? You'd be more likely to flag a car down by the time you finished walking.

[kalvado]

15 miles doesn't seem like much when you're driving. But on foot? I work part time as a valet. I work 8-hour days. I'm not sure I've ever covered 15 miles walking/running in a shift.

Depending on situation, 15 miles may be OK, or 1 mile may be too much.

Definitely. But (obviously) we don't know what kind of state the driver might be in at the time, so as a precaution, call boxes are typically placed much closer together, to keep an injured driver from having to walk too far. The 90 Floating Bridges in Seattle have call boxes about every 500 feet. This would seem to be an ideal minimum, but I wouldn't place any more than a mile apart. A mile takes about 20 minutes to cover if in normal condition. That's a long time if you're injured. 15 Miles? What's even the point? You'd be more likely to flag a car down by the time you finished walking.

If you cannot flag a car - most likely you're not on a highway or timing is really bad. But most non-highways don't have call boxes at all...
It boils down, from my perspective, to having quite narrow range of circumstances where call boxes are both useful and essential - i.e. you can use them, and using them helps sufficiently.
Call boxes on bridges, as we discussed, are more of a suicide prevention thing...

[UCFKnights]

15 miles doesn't seem like much when you're driving. But on foot? I work part time as a valet. I work 8-hour days. I'm not sure I've ever covered 15 miles walking/running in a shift.

Depending on situation, 15 miles may be OK, or 1 mile may be too much.

Definitely. But (obviously) we don't know what kind of state the driver might be in at the time, so as a precaution, call boxes are typically placed much closer together, to keep an injured driver from having to walk too far. The 90 Floating Bridges in Seattle have call boxes about every 500 feet. This would seem to be an ideal minimum, but I wouldn't place any more than a mile apart. A mile takes about 20 minutes to cover if in normal condition. That's a long time if you're injured. 15 Miles? What's even the point? You'd be more likely to flag a car down by the time you finished walking.

With them a mile apart, you would never have to walk a mile to a call box... If you're a few hundred feet past a call box, you should easily be able to look back and see that you passed it...  If you can't see it, you're likely not more then 10 minutes walking to one if you have to guess which direction... its not gonna be a mile.

[jakeroot]

15 miles doesn't seem like much when you're driving. But on foot? I work part time as a valet. I work 8-hour days. I'm not sure I've ever covered 15 miles walking/running in a shift.

Depending on situation, 15 miles may be OK, or 1 mile may be too much.

Definitely. But (obviously) we don't know what kind of state the driver might be in at the time, so as a precaution, call boxes are typically placed much closer together, to keep an injured driver from having to walk too far. A mile takes about 20 minutes to cover if in normal condition. That's a long time if you're injured. 15 Miles? What's even the point? You'd be more likely to flag a car down by the time you finished walking.

If you cannot flag a car - most likely you're not on a highway or timing is really bad. But most non-highways don't have call boxes at all...
It boils down, from my perspective, to having quite narrow range of circumstances where call boxes are both useful and essential - i.e. you can use them, and using them helps sufficiently.

If the DOT is going to put in phones, the idea should not be for them to be a last resort. i.e. flag a car down ... if that doesn't work, seek out a phone. The phone's should be the first, and easiest resource a driver can seek if they have no phone or other means of contact. Here in Washington, hitchhiking is illegal, so most drivers don't stop for people on the side of the road to begin with.

Every 15 miles might be better than nothing, sure. But don't give the poor bastard hope that he might reach a phone if it's going to take him anywhere from twenty minutes to ten hours to reach a phone. If you're going to install them, do it properly.

The 90 Floating Bridges in Seattle have call boxes about every 500 feet. This would seem to be an ideal minimum, but I wouldn't place any more than a mile apart.

Call boxes on bridges, as we discussed, are more of a suicide prevention thing...

I don't think that's WSDOT's idea here...


(image via Seattle-pi/Joshua Trujillo)

[kalvado]

Here in Washington, hitchhiking is illegal, so most drivers don't stop for people on the side of the road to begin with.

Well, in most cases you can tell hitchhiker from driver in distress. Someone standing near non-moving car isn't likely to be hitchhiking..
Thing is, I have hard time understanding how actual things looked like in pre-cell phone days in unpopulated areas. We don't have to many exit being 30 miles apart (I can think of one spot, actually) over here, and I never lived in such location. Probably I drove such places... single digit number of times, though. And I vaguely remember pre-cell phone days..

But in general - walking along highway seems a bad idea for me. And I suspect that whoever placed those call boxes didn't have that in mind as their primary operating mode.
The other thing they probably had in mind can be cost efficiency. I wonder if there is any statistics on usage of those boxes, would be interesting to compare  pre-1990 as reference, and post-2010 as modern. Maybe those 30 miles are based on usage estimate and typical usage scenarios?

I don't think that's WSDOT's idea here...

(cynical mode on)
if there is no proper jumping bridge in the area, even this one can be used. Would be pretty slow, but probably you can sink after a while.

[jakeroot]

I don't think that's WSDOT's idea here...

(cynical mode on)
if there is no proper jumping bridge in the area, even this one can be used. Would be pretty slow, but probably you can sink after a while.

Well, sure. But I still don't think that WSDOT installed the phones to help talk people out of drowning themselves. There's plenty of other bridges in the Seattle area that would be more likely to experience "jumpers" that have either no phones, or very few: Ship Canal, Aurora, East Channel, West Seattle, Spokane Street, Magnolia, and so on. The phones on the 90 Floating Bridges are only there because they were a WSDOT standard when the bridge was built, and it was decided that, due to the remote nature of, not only the bridge, but bridges in general, and the tunnels flanking either end (that have poor mobile phone coverage for whatever reason), that they should stay in case of breakdown or collision.