The Disappearing Freeway Call Box

A call box on Interstate 215 in the Inland Empire. Photo credit: SANBAG.

For decades, whenever you drive the freeways in Southern California, you see these blue signs with yellow boxes below the sign, all over the places. These things were known as “Call Boxes“. Call Boxes were used to provide help for motorists who were stranded on the freeways. For most of my life, I have seen a lot of these kinds of boxes, at least until mobile phones overtook the land-line phones at the end of the 2000’s.

Until the end of the 1990’s, Call boxes were found every 1/4 miles on most Southern California freeways. However, between in recent years, most call boxes on Southern California freeways were removed for two reasons: One was, the increasing costs to maintain call boxes. California’s budget crisis of recent years, made keeping boxes like these a challenge because there was not enough money to go around. The other was the usage of these boxes fell by 80 percent between 2001 and 2011, according to a study by MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) in Northern California, as more and more drivers use mobile phones for help instead of call boxes. According to the OCTA (Orange County Transportation Authority), only half of the 585 Call Boxes that were installed on Orange County freeways in the 1980’s are still in operation.

Each call box are marked by the route number of the freeway (such as the 5, 10, 101, 210, 405, etc.), followed by the post mile number. Freeway Call Boxes are placed on the right shoulder of the freeway by local governments, not Caltrans. This means, entities like the Los Angeles County MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority), the OCTA, or SANBAG (San Bernardino County Governments) are in charge of those little boxes, and therefore they are the ones that put up (or remove) the call boxes.

Today, when I drive on a Los Angeles-area freeway, I now only see a few call boxes when I am on the freeway; there is only one call box per mile. On some freeways, Call Boxes are all but gone. In the coming years, if current trends continue, more and more call boxes will be removed from the freeways. Eventually, call boxes on Southern California freeways will become just memory of my younger days.