Pay phones remaining in the US

The slow American vanishing of the pay phone and the slow American rise of the golf cart emergency room visit have, since 2002, been locked in an inverse dance (r = -0.960) that suggests one has been eating the other. This is almost certainly not happening, though one does picture the final pay phone being rolled down a retirement-community fairway. One technology retires; another retirement community accelerates.

Both lines reflect twenty years of generational replacement. US pay phones collapsed from roughly 1.9 million in 2002 to under 100,000 today, extinguished by cell phones that spread across exactly the same years; golf cart ER injuries rose from about 6,300 annually to over 18,000 as retirement communities in Florida, Arizona, and the Carolinas built out, and as local ordinances in places like The Villages allowed golf carts as street-legal transport. One is the tail of an old infrastructure dying; the other is the head of a new retirement infrastructure colliding with curbs and palmetto roots.

One hangs up forever. One rolls quietly over someone's foot. Both are consequences of Time.