An emergency telephone is a phone specifically provided for making calls to emergency services and is most often found in a place of special danger or where it is likely that there will be a need to make emergency calls. It is also sometimes known as blue lights. Roadside emergency telephones Although it is difficult to determine when and where the earliest highway emergency phones were developed, undoubtedly one of the earliest examples were the freeway phones developed in Western Australia in 1966. This system was developed by Alan Harman, an employee of a Western Australian security firm, Central Station Security Company, Electronic Signals Pty Ltd, who came up with the idea after reading of a pile-up on the Kwinana Freeway. The newspaper article mentioned that assistance had been difficult to provide to those involved in the pile-up. The system Harman envisaged was a series of telephone units in a box on a short post, spaced every on Perth’s freeways. Picking up the handset would trigger an alarm in the Main Roads control centre and police, fire or ambulance could then be determined by the caller. Harman developed the system with the approval of the Main Roads Commissioner and Chief Engineer, by adapting the existing design of communication facilities used at the security firm in which he worked. Emergency telephones are commonly found alongside major roads throughout the world. In the United Kingdom, orange "SOS" call boxes are spaced every on all motorways as well as some major "A" roads, with roadside markers indicating the nearest phone. Emergency telephones were installed every on all limited-access highways ("Freeways") throughout Southern California in the United States beginning in the 1970s. In Melbourne, Australia, emergency telephones were introduced on metropolitan freeways in 1976, originally on the Tullamarine, South Eastern and Lower Yarra (West Gate) Freeways. On Italian "Autostrade" ("Motorways"), "SOS" emergency phones, generally coloured in yellow, are found spaced every . As cell phone use continues to increase, the need for emergency telephones declines and they are being phased out in many cities. In California, freeway call boxes dropped from 98,000 uses in 2001 to 20,100 in 2010, or about 1 call per box per month. The annual maintenance of freeway call boxes for the Service Authority for Freeways and Expressways (SAFE) program in the San Francisco Bay Area was $1.7 million annually in 2011. During the 2010s, California removed most of their