Pay phones remaining in the US

As feral hogs have spread into more US states, pay phones have disappeared, a negative correlation of -0.981 that suggests either that hogs are destroying phone booths or that both trends measure the same inexorable modernization of the American landscape. The hogs expand into new territory, the phone booths contract into obsolescence, and the chart traces both with the evolutionary precision of one invasive species replacing another. The hog roots through the dirt. The smartphone roots through the app store. Both rendered the pay phone unnecessary.

Feral hogs expanded from about 30 states to all 48 contiguous states. Pay phones declined from about 1.5 million to under 100,000 between 2004 and 2020. One spreads, the other vanishes, nine data points. Both trends are measures of landscape change: hogs because they are biologically unstoppable, pay phones because they are technologically obsolete. The smartphone is the shared variable—it replaced the pay phone and, through GPS and trail cameras, enabled the tracking of feral hog expansion.

Nine years of more hogs and fewer pay phones is a portrait of the American landscape in transition: the analog infrastructure disappears, the biological invaders proliferate, and the smartphone mediates between both. The phone booth was once ubiquitous, the hog was once regional, and both situations have reversed. The coin slot is empty. The hog population is not.