Last public payphone removed from Manhattan streets | Hacker News Reader

Last public payphone removed from Manhattan streets

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183 pointselsewhen248 comments

My father, now 70 years old, got stuck in Sicily with a broken car earlier this year. He had forgot his mobile phone home. He wasn't able to find a landline phone that he could use. Exasperated after trying several locations (bars, fast foods, etc asking for a phone call only to be denied) for 45 minutes, he decided to enter a vodafone store. They would not let him use _any_ phone because it was against the _policy_ (???). He asked if he could buy a phone and charge it, but was pretty complex (at least for him - mind you he had money and credit card with him). Maybe the fact that his accent betrays the fact that he's a foreigner had something to do with it...

Long story short, in 1970 you could get a phone call at the bar down the street and ring home if you were in trouble. People in the neighbourhoods were eager to help. In 2022, in Sicily, if you lose your mobile phone you're effectively _done_.

Another case of an optional thing that enhanced experiences and made you more free becoming something you must have to do anything, so, removing some freedom after all.

See also: the automobile, at least as experienced in the US and similar countries.

[EDIT] and in both cases, the problem is the effect the new thing had on the environment around it. When tech- and progress-focused people can't figure out why some cultures/countries have "anti-progress" laws (France's protection of book stores, for instance), well, this is often part of why they do that.

> When tech- and progress-focused people can't figure out why some cultures/countries have "anti-progress" laws (France's protection of book stores, for instance), well, this is often part of why they do that.

This is an enormously under-appreciated perspective here, thanks for pointing it out. What appears to be a foolish luddite is often someone with a thoughtful, long-term perspective based on hard-won experience.

Chesterton's Fence, yet again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

Kind of, but a bit different. Both are cases of unintended consequences, but one involves something that was deliberately made or set up a certain way, and the other involves a state of affairs that existed essentially by accident. This is how people get away with arguing that changes to the status quo, under shifting technology or the demands of business, are "natural", so efforts to preserve the status quo are "unnatural"—because the prior state wasn't made that way deliberately, and absent coordinated action it may be demolished by changes, even if most people would prefer to retain some or all of the prior state, at some shared cost.

I heard someone make that defence of a river rerouting that let a bunch of sea water in to a lake and killed all the fish and shell fish.

Story seems to be more about people being jerks and not letting someone use a phone to make a quick call. Obviously there were tons of phones around but no one would let him use one.

It's rare but I have had someone ask to use my phone and I let them without any question

i lived without a cell phone due to poverty sometime in the not too distant past and it made me develop certain new perspectives on tech and society

Along the lines of an optional thing removing freedom, I have had tremendous trouble waving down a cab sometimes because all the cabs that were coming to the area have been hailed through apps.

I was literally listening to a podcast about this trade-off today by Andy Crouch, he’s the author of The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World

What was the podcast?

When it comes to automobiles and the US... are there any similar countries?

Most of Europe outside of large metros is the same as well.

There’s a difference between “it’s rural so things are spread out” and what we have in places like LA and Houston where major metro centers that could have been dense with good transit were purposely designed to be spread out and only able to be gotten around in in an automobile

There are plenty of non-US places which used to have transit and now do not. Britain's 1960s "Beeching Axe" comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts

It depends. For example there are many places that are too small to live without a car, but where you can do basic grocery shopping or kids can still go to school on foot or by bike. The spread is rarely comparable to the US.

Europe is not like the west coast of the US. Even urban areas are practically unnavigable by foot; everything is too spread out and only accessible by walking along heavily trafficked roads.

You'll want at least a bicycle in rural Europe, but you don't normally need a whole lot more.

Canada

Definitely the suburbs around the major cities. 40 minute walk to the nearest store does seem unreasonable.

2 hours to bus to work or 15 minutes to drive.

Depends on where.

I'm in Victoria and don't need a car (have one, though).

That may be the point of the comparison, as I understood it, with urban areas that don't require cars more of an exception than a norm. This is certainly the case in the US as well (NYC metro, DC metro, SF metro, university towns, etc.).

Perhaps, but I'd say urban areas are the norm here. 80% of Canada lives along the Windsor-Quebec City corridor.

I'm aware. As for the urbanization, that's about on par with the US (82% for Canada, 83% for the US according to this metric [1]).

More to the point, most of those areas outside of Toronto and Montreal have middling-to-no usable public transport. For example, I was recently passing by Kingston, ON, which has buses in some parts of the city but they reach a fraction of the population in the Kingston metro area. The same goes for much of the Windsor-London corridor. The qualification I stated was "urban areas that don't require cars," not any urban area.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...

I’ve been to Victoria.

Plenty of places in the US you don’t need a car either by that definition.

I traveled through Europe all through 2018.

The only bit of trouble I had throughout the entire trip was me trying to be a good Samaritan.

Someone approached me, lost, asking me for directions because they didn't have a phone. In my American naivete, I pulled out my phone and help them look for this fictitious restaurant they were supposedly looking for.

During the conversation, the person got close to me and before I knew it had pick pocketed 50 euros out of my pocket.

I'd still do my best to help in the future, but I can definitely understand why people are reluctant to help others in foreign countries.

I used to live in Italy. The first thing other Americans in my group taught me was to automatically assume that anyone and everyone around you is trying to scam or pickpocket you.

Did some 11-year-old kid just get on the bus? Is he wearing a fluffy jacket? That little shit is gonna try to pickpocket you, guaranteed. He likely has a razor blade and will slice open the bottom of your backpack while people are jostling each other around on the bus. Have nothing in your pockets, keep your back to the wall, and hold your backpack in your hands in front of you. Did a well-dressed stranger smile and strike up a conversation? They're a Jehovah's Witness, and they're going to try to manipulate you into letting them come into your house and indoctrinate you. Don't acknowledge their existence. Don't smile back, don't make eye contact. Zero engagement. Is some friendly guy at the Trevi Fountain offer you a fun-looking squishy balloon? It's the cheapest possible thing you can imagine, and he's going to start demanding 50x the value of the thing once you were naive enough to actually grab it when he shoved it at you. Is there a transient woman in the train station with a young child lurching at you while shoving the kid into your arms? She's going to start screaming that you're a kidnapper and then demand 50 euros from you to make your new "problem" go away. Did the ticket checker claim that your bus ticket wasn't stamped correctly? Nothing a 20-euro "fine," paid in cash directly to the ticket-checker, won't fix.

By the way, any and all of the above happened to an American in my group at one point or another -- sometimes several times -- in our years there.

One weird trick: try not to appear American. American tourists are targeted because they tend to have valuables, also many cultures have a low opinion of the USA (anyone from the USA deserves behaviour X in response). I wish it weren’t like that, but it is hard to change stereotypes.

When travelling I might make out I am a hippy traveller type (low value target), or act like I’m from another country (e.g. Spanish tourists are known to be tight/tacaño in Morocco), and I try to avoid carrying or wearing anything that makes me stand out as a target (bumbag, camera, expensive accessories, high value branded clothes).

As a broad rule, you need to be most safety conscious in high density tourist areas. The only places I have been where I really knew I was unsafe were Rio (dangerous to locals too), and Nha Trang. In areas with very few tourists, I have usually been able to be fairly trusting, which leads to better experiences. Travelling as a hypersensitive victim is not fun: people sense your distrust and react poorly to it.

I am a New Zealander, and we tend to have a reputation for friendliness, which I try to project and maintain our reputation.

I have been obnoxiously drunk a few times when I have pretended to be Australian or American, sorry guys.

>> One weird trick: try not to appear American.

That would mean losing a hundred pounds. Easier said than done.

You seem to have a real issue with Americans in general. It'd be just as wrong to say that all New Zealanders are mocked because of their accent, and they should try not to sound so silly. Do some people in other countries have beef with Americans? Sure, and I've run into plenty in Europe. But I've far and away run into more folks that simply don't care and are friendly, or are keen to talk about the U.S. Might be worth taking a hard look at your prejudice.

I had someone try the same grift to me in NYC but they went for my decoy pocket that only had used tissues.

Yes, luckily I only had a small amount in my pocket and the rest in a money belt.

This is an interesting social breakdown for me.

I got lost running in a not-fancy and exclusive but quite nice area in an outer borough of NYC a couple years ago. I didn't have my phone.

Dressed like I was going to run a marathon, I asked people who I saw had phones if they would be so kind as to look up the directions to where I had come from.

Several different people, including one in a city agency truck, refused to open Google Maps for me. One claimed their smart phone didn't have a maps app and the others said things about data or they were in a rush.

I couldn't believe it and I wound up getting help from an old man who gave me audible directions that included so many steps I only found my way back by going in the right direction and slowly getting less lost.

Did you ask them more like "Can you pull up Google maps?" Or "Do you know the way to 5th Street?"

The first one would make me question if you are trying to steal my phone or something, but I might pull out my phone to help you with the second.

Good tip for would-be phone thieves: ask for directions, your mark may not think twice about pulling out their phone.

> I only found my way back by going in the right direction and slowly getting less lost.

This works pretty reliably, at least in cities, by the way.

Last night I dreamed I got lost and didn't have cell phone.

I went to the library, asked to use one of the computers they have for library patrons.

I was able to use Google Maps, but I couldn't get in touch with a friend who lived nearby, because -- I didn't have my phone. Everything set up with two-factor authentication, I couldn't get to email or send text message. Maybe just as well, on a public kiosk like that. But was distressing.

There's 2FA on my dreams.

They are replacing the payphones with LinkNYC kiosks that include a phone that makes free US calls

Interesting. I hadn't seen these before (not a NY resident and very rarely a visitor).

https://www.link.nyc/

Former NYC resident. Those things are everywhere in Manhattan and in surprisingly good condition most of the times.

Those look really cool.

How do they work in practice? Do they get vandalized a lot? Do people actually charge their devices with them?

We have those in London too under the name InLink and are run by BT (the main telephone company here). BT used to offer free calls on them, but they had to stop because it was mostly being used by purchasers of drugs as an anonymous means of putting in an order. In terms of charging, they’re well used by homeless people.

https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/News_events/2019/April_2019/...

That is sad. I don't carry my cell phone with me everywhere, and I have never had a problem finding some one willing to lend me their phone if I needed to make a call. I have never been to Sicily before though :)

Having lived a couple of years in Italy, I can attest that Italians are hard on the outside and chewy on the inside. They have built a hard outer shell to deal with all of the constant bullshit that they're awash in day-in and day-out. But once you're "in," you are *in*. The degree of mutual trust and goodwill among their in-groups would put most North American social groups, including and perhaps especially families, to shame.

How did you get those asterisks? I get in not *in*.

Oh now I get *in*.

I'm in.

I think it is similar in most Mediterranean countries, the US culture is derived from north west European

For anyone else who might get stuck like this: hit up any public service place. Libraries, police/fire station, civic office, tourist info kiosk etc.

It's true and it's almost a vicious cycle: Because the cost of being without a phone is so high, people are unwilling to let strangers use their phones in case they run off with it (or drop it in a puddle).

Unless there's a kind stranger/public service avaliable, you're stuck if your phone fails for whatever reason. You could argue that there's no excuse to not go out with a spare charger and all, but I've had my handset just stop working while on the road. I have friends who have had their phone pickpocketed.

This also adds on an additional concern as places begin to forego say physical credit cards and IDs in favor of electronic ones that again live on your phone. If that phone is dead, you can't even buy a new one or get money from an ATM. Likely in such a future I'll need to have a redundant phone on me at all times just incase this happens.

You didn't mention it but I'm guessing he got back and told you the story so you aren't effectively done, it's just more of a hassle if you're unwilling to ask a passing stranger.

In Australia they just made all payphones free for all calls to anywhere in Australia (inc to cell phones). It's great.

Did he ask a stranger? When I got locked out of my house even the fedex driver who happened to be there let me use his phone to call someone.

I would think that this is neighborhood-dependent.

Unless you look like a crackhead or beggar, anyone would lend his phone for a few seconds/minutes.

I assume it's a global thing but in London there is a category of beggar that doesn't really look like a beggar. They usually have a story about their car running out of petrol or losing their train ticket. I've been approached by the same guy two days running telling me that he just lost his train ticket a few minutes before (what an unlucky guy).

My point is that in cities you evolve an attitude that pretty much anyone who walks up to you with a sob story is likely to be at best a beggar and at worst a thief/scammer. I think you could get someone to make a call on your behalf but actually handing you their phone (even for a moment) - that might be less common than you think.

Also our phones are >= $1000 devices. How are we supposed to trust handing that to just anyone?

I have faced this before - A stranger dialed the number I wanted to call, put it on speaker and let me speak to my friend.

I did this recently for a homeless woman on the street. In my case I was more concerned about COVID risk than the risk of her stealing my phone (as I had a bicycle and she didn't, and she looked tired and emaciated and unlikely to be able to harm me).

As a result, I overheard her entire long desperate attempt to persuade her mother to give her another other other other last chance. :-( :-( :-(

Good idea. Hadn't even thought of that since the question is usually "can I borrow your phone" which implies handing it over.

Not true.

Most people aren't using and can't afford the flagship models. I personnally have never bought a smartphone more than 180€ and I know a lot of people doing the same thing.

Do they have monthly payments for phones in Europe, or is it all just one lump-sum payment?

Most people I know have flagship phones and the ability to make many smaller payments may have something to do with that.

Monthly payments exist and some people use them to pay for a flagship phone but most people understand this is just diguised credit and they'd rather have a cheaper subscription.

Also I've seen people do that drop/lose/get their expensive phone stolen and then pay for almost 2 years for a device they don't use. The replacement is usually a lot cheaper and they realize their life is not that different with a cheaper smartphone and don't repeat the experience unless they are social status show offs.

I definitely wouldn’t, at least not without lots of convincing. Probably I’d call someone for you though.

Access to all of my personal info, my password manager, etc. If someone turned and ran with my phone, it would give me days worth of hassle to replace and recover things like canceling my SIM card, buying a new one, changing 2FA, trying to remotely wipe it, maybe provide info to police.

I hate how dependent I am on this little rectangle but it’s kind of just reality these days to have so much of our lives closely tied to it

My password manager is locked by default but I have a second android profile that I switch to when I hand out my phone to someone else. I imagine iOS has a similar feature. I don't want my kids or a friend ruin my browser history.

Last time I dropped my phone in the sea, I got a new sim card the next day from my operator, reactivating all the 2FA shit isn't too complicated as long as you keep the same number. It was annoying but 99% was taken care of as soon as I had the sim card.

The only thing that took several days was access to a bank account I have open in a remote country as I hadn't given them my latest address and they had to do back to back verifications, shipping me codes then calling me to verify the same person who was on the phone was living in the place he pretended to live, then sending me back 2 different letters one with a new password, one with a code to activate 2FA.

That's a huge problem. Payphones don't have biases. As long as you have enough money, they just work.

People have many, many biases. (For example, against homeless, and those who are often in most need of help.)

The reality of depending on other people is that you're dependent on their flaws. This works out for most people, but certainly does not for many of those who are marginalized.

> As long as you have enough money, they just work.

Even if you didn't you would just call collect.

Tbh I’ve let alcoholics on the street use my phone, they’re usually too wasted to make a run with it.

People think I’m crazy for it though.

I also handed out my phone to a drunk homeless guy who wanted to call a friend so that he can lend him money to go back to his country of origin after an unsuccessful attempt to start a new life here.

My immediate thought was "surely, if you talked to any police officer, if not at the station, they would help out? And if not, any library or other public service?"

I have literally tried exactly this before, and apparently my not having a phone to contact anyone wasn’t actually the officers problem.

In what city ?

If you don't have your phone, how do you know where the nearest public service is, especially in a foreign land.

I’m old enough to remember asking people for directions.

And I'm old enough to remember this clip on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXlpVz9rnx4

If you're not aware, many people are assholes, and the story that you're reading is about an instance where someone was finding that everyone around them was being an asshole, that means it's less than likely that they would have stopped to give them directions.

If you're not aware, many people are assholes

Oh come on, most people are awesome. People LOVE to help, it empowers them, makes them feel good. When you look at books with advice about building relationships and friendships, you'll almost always find suggestions to ASK people you want to get closer to for help.

I don't feel like having a semantic argument over the different between many and most.

The world is full of many lovely, caring people, but that does little to help a person when they happen to run into a bunch of assholes.

It is very feasible that a person travelling to another country could have a negative experience with everyone they meet due to racism or xenophobia, or whatever and that this would lead to a situation where even people on the street show them nothing but scorn.

Imagine a Ukrainian asking for the nearest police station in Russia right now.

Or someone wearing a thin blue line asking for directions at a stereotypical leftist college campus.

> Imagine a Ukrainian asking for the nearest police station in Russia right now.

> Or someone wearing a thin blue line asking for directions at a stereotypical leftist college campus.

I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if in either case the person who is lost gets the help they need.

The world is full of assholes, but they are the minority compared to the majority of helpful people, especially when it comes to simple things such as direction. Speak the local language helps of course.

> I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if in either case the person who is lost gets the help they need.

Every single time?

Like you're saying that there's absolutely no chance that this could happen in these situations, or in any situations, which makes no sense given that statistically this kind of shit happens every day to someone.

At almost any given moment someone is being told to fuck off because the asked a stranger for directions.

Have you never had this happen to you?

> Imagine a Ukrainian asking for the nearest police station in Russia right now.

Not sure what you expect to happen. There won't be any way to tell the difference, and even if there was nobody would care. In Moscow on a busy street, you'll probably be ignored for some time until someone helps you, not just because they are assholes there, but simply because most people aren't locals; in most sub-1M cities, there will be plenty of people willing to help.

I once heard some rich youtubers say - "giving feels so good it almost feels selfish" which I kind agree with, especially once you have your needs covered (most of HN).

OP is literally a story about someone asking strangers for directions and being given the cold shoulder. You proposal is to… ask those same unhelpful strangers directions to a different destination instead?

This also assumes you feel safe talking to police in the first place.

Not just Sicily, a similar scenario happened to me in Salt Lake City UT. People are strangely asshole about letting someone in need use their cell phone.

It's much more strange to me that people WOULD let strangers use their cell phone. Back when it was just a phone, sure. But now it's my wallet with all of my credit cards and banking loaded on it, it has all of my passwords and all of my OTP apps and codes, it has the ability to unlock doors in my house (and for some people to open and start their car) it contains all of the contact information for everyone I know, it effectively has every email I've ever sent or received and every picture I have ever taken or been sent, it has access to publish content as me on trusted social media profiles. Yes, obviously all of this should be protected by much more than just physical security. But we all know that software locks can almost always be broken if you're in possession of the physical device.

I happily help strangers when I can, but I'm not going to hand over the keys to my entire life, on the most fragile and expensive object I probably have on my person.

The biggest problem is just the value of the phone. There’s just way too much risk handing a stranger a $500-1000 object that they could just run away with!

And you can have an NFC device on you to take money from the phone once it's unlocked!

I would just call for them and let them use speaker phone.

On Android you can add alternate users, I have one that only has the phone app installed specifically in case I ever need to let someone use it.

Its not at all strange that you cannot use my device that has access to some really important personal info on it. It's rude for me to hover over you while you are talking on the phone so I can make sure you aren't snooping through my messages, email, etc, and I'm not about to let you use a device that has access to those unsupervised.

Exactly my thought as well. If the phone only was just that, a phone, I would happily lend it out to strangers all the time (at least if it looked like they didn't have the stamina to outrun me :P).

There's too much risk to hand a stranger your cell phone, unfortunately. They can steal the phone, call some high cost number, venmo themselves money, who knows what else.

I think it depends on how you phrase it, there's a big difference to me between asking somebody to place a call on behalf of you on speakerphone, versus asking them to physically handover an unlocked smart phone.

I'm very reluctant when people ask me for the reasons others have said.

Not saying you didn't do this but I'm much more likely to help when someone comes up with a clear and concise statement of the problem and a minimally intrusive solution ("hey, my phone is dead and my wife has the charger, could you call the Hilton on speaker and ask for Room 123?" or even "could I log in to my Facebook for a second and send a message to my friend saying I don't have my phone but I'll be at Starbucks, you can hold the phone?")

Did he offer to pay strangers on the street or business staff for the phone calls he was intending to make from their mobile phone?

In NZ if you stop at side of the road or open your hood in parking lot someone will offer help within minutes.

My gf took away my phone because I was reading HN too much in the club. I went home alone without a phone. Not a single cab would stop for me on the street, they all just take Uber orders now. Walked 5 miles in the freezing cold.

Did the cell phone replace the towel?

no more hardline exits...

If you both loose your cellphone and lack social skills to ask literally anyone else to lend you theirs, then I guess you're in trouble. But it works out for the rest of us, so the cost to some rare individuals is worth the benefit to the rest of the society. I for one never lost a cell phone in my life.

Payphone seems to be like public toilets: you don't want to use one, when you have to, you are glad they are there.

3-4 years ago I got stuck in San Francisco with a dead cellphone and broken car. I remembered my spouse's number, I don't remember of I forgot my wallet somewhere or it wasn't accepting cards, but I do remember asking a random woman on the street for few coins. Anyway, I was able to call and even to get a call back in few minutes.

It can be a public safety matter, hopefully no-one needs it, but when one does, can be for a good reason.

For what it's worth, you don't need coins to use payphones. You can usually just call collect. I've done it once about a decade ago, before I had a cell phone.

Can cellular phones receive collect calls?

Come to think about it, I don't know.

Supposedly this is not the case: https://www.hellgatenyc.com/the-death-of-nyc-payphones-lies/

If you live in the NYC area, I guess you could hop on down and verify this yourself.

Via 2600 (which if you ever read you'd know would be on the case) https://twitter.com/2600/status/1529174328054620162

Is should also be noted that the Link kiosks they've been replacing them with have phone functionality ... it's free even. I've used them once when my cellphone died. They don't have handsets, so everyone around can hear both sides of the conversation, but in a pinch they're useful. And let's be honest, free > private in this situation. I don't know the last time I was walking around with enough quarters to use a payphone.

Now, the Link kiosks are 99.9% about advertising, with just enough of a public service to justify this base monetization of the commons. On the whole, I'm not a fan. I went to a tech talk at the company behind them (in a swanky new tower in the Hudson yards) and their sizzle/promo reel running on a loop really made me sick.

> They don't have handsets, so everyone around can hear both sides of the conversation

If you were in NYC in the early 2000s, you'd generally have one person on every train car on a nextel chirp phone having a conversation for everyone to enjoy.

Ah, iDEN has gone the way of floppy disks. My old Moto i955 for Boost Mobile (MVNO of Nextel, later carried along with Sprint on CDMA) is a quite heavy and rocky solid paperweight.

They were doing something similar in London for a while. They'd install a large advert screen with a phone attached and say it was a payphone because the local planning rules made it difficult to oppose installation of a payphone. The calls were actually free.

Well yeah, there are tons of empty "booths" just without phones. They're commonly used by drug dealers as stash points / occupied by homeless. Admittedly, while living in NYC I'd use them to duck out of the rain on occasion :)

When I lived in NYC, I frequently saw these things being used as urinals by homeless people.

I'd rather just walk in the rain.

I like the word "admittedly" there because I read it as it's a dirty little secret of yours, haha.

There are payphones in the stations still. They were talking about on the surface sidewalks.

> There are payphones in the stations still. They were talking about on the surface sidewalks.

There are at least four other payphones on sidewalks in the UWS.

https://www.westsiderag.com/2022/05/24/rumors-of-the-phone-b...

Well then! problem solved. :)

Are there any situations where it would be desirable to keep some payphones around? Potentially in some sort of natural disaster where cell towers get knocked down, or at least reduced in capacity to the point where it's no longer possible to reliably make calls?

There was a situation in Canada a year or two ago where one of our two main wireless providers rolled out a bad firmware update to all of their transmitters at the same time and had a system wide outage for nearly nine hours, I could imagine a need for payphones if something like that were to happen in NYC.

Yes. I worked in the "street furniture" industry. It used to me Cemusa and another company who's name slips mind.

This was decades ago, but still in an Era when people were asking why pay phones still exist. It's the ad revenue.

Companies like Cemusa give cities like NYC big money (dozens or hundreds of millions) to buy the right to provide the city with " street furniture" for free, in exchange for the right to sell the ad revenue placed on those pieces of street furniture. This includes pay phones, bus stop shelters, benches, news stands, etc.

This dynamic is what caused NYC payphones to exist far beyond their useful life as pay phones.

I talk about it on this "being an engineer" podcast I was recently on: https://teampipeline.us/ian-mceachern-engineering-freelancin...

>It used to me Cemusa and another company who's name slips mind.

JCDecaux is the other one - they actually bought Cemusa a few years ago.

Definitely. Telstra in Australia recently made all their (15000) payphones free and the CEO specifically called out bushfires and cyclones (hurricanes) as events that have brought the mobile network down:

About 11m calls were made across Telstra pay phones in the past year, including 230,000 calls to critical services such as triple zero and Lifeline.

The Telstra chief executive, Andrew Penn, said pay phones were a vital lifeline, particularly for the homeless and people escaping an unsafe situation.

“I have been moved seeing firsthand queues of people waiting in line to use a payphone to tell their family and friends they’re safe after a bushfire, a cyclone or some other natural disaster has taken the mobile network down,” he said.[1]

I believe the existence/number of payphones is mandated by the federal government.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/03/telstra-to-...

Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) was the weakest link in the land lines. Since so much traffic has moved off onto wireless I would think there's a lot of reason to use landlines as a reliable emergency line when the towers are overloaded or down. Landlines were reliable for power outages since the power was supplied separately by the phone company and the lines were buried in the ground.

> landlines as a reliable emergency line

Unfortunately, carriers are letting POTS rot.

It is arguably unreliable now in some places. My grandmother's land line (semi-rural Ohio) goes out every few months and it usually takes a week or so for them to fix it. When we talked to them at one point, they suggested she get a cell phone.

Just another example of how planning for quarterly reports causes massive value destruction.

Came here to say the same thing. Funnily enough I'm in semi-rural Ohio. I see POTS infrastructure all over the place being neglected. Boxes are open to the elements. Spliced cables are just laying out on the ground.

I can only imagine the ghosts of old-school telco linemen rolling in their graves over this.

I keep meaning to do a deep-dive into public utility regulation here to see if the incumbent telcos are required to maintain that infrastructure. I'd actually have fun going out and photographing/geotagging damaged infrastructure if a court would actually compel the telco to do something about it.

There are plenty of examples of companies shooting themselves in the foot by only looking at the short term, but this doesn’t seem like one of them. It’s not like investment in POTS is going to pay off in the long run: rural America is depopulating, most households are becoming cellphone only, etc. There’s no positive ROI for POTS out in the countryside no matter what time horizon you look at.

The actual fix here is that we have to take a hard look and really decide if this is something worth keeping around. If it is, it needs massive ongoing subsidies. The market alone won’t fix it, because the economics simply aren’t there.

This isn't just a rural problem. I live in a city that is home base to a major regional telco. They wouldn't deploy fiber and let their copper rot. I had 4Mb DSL some years back that went bad so I was moved to a new pair that could only manage 2Mb despite being relatively close to the CO. These companies DGAF.

Telcos have been given free resources from the government for decades to maintain rural infrastructure. ROI never entered into in the first place.

Even if it were beneficial, nobody will pay to up keep them. And even if they did, without incentive to make sure they actually work, I suspect they'd fall into disrepair anyway since it wouldn't be a priority.

Except they (more specifically, ads) pay for themselves.

This just just supports the OPs point though. They may have paid for themselves but whomever was collecting that money(Titan mostly) was not maintaining the condition of the phones. The phone were almost always in disgusting and deplorable condition.

The call boxes alongside US highways are starting to disappear also - so many people have cell phones and most highways are patrolled at least once a day, so the cost of keeping them working is not worth it as much.

Interestingly — these call boxes are still prevalent along highways (along with these odd S.0.S. Pull offs every km/ half km or so) throughout much of northern Italy (and if my memory serves.. also in Germany, as of this past fall).

I think there may be a a divide between toll/non toll roads tho — curious if anyone knows why this is.

Wow... I'd actually forgotten these even ever existed until I read this comment, so I guess you're right... What a blast from the past!

This is 100% gone for urban freeways in California.

They have them on the freeways in LA

Hmm, didn't notice. In Bay Area, definitely gone.

Or just having your phone die and needing to call someone for a ride. Of course, then you need their number memorized, which is less common now.

I keep a small printout in my wallet with 20 phone numbers just for that situation.

It was common for phone booths to have copies of the yellow and white pages, though it was also common for people to just go in and tear up the pages

I live near some mountainous rural terrain. There is no cell coverage in large swaths of valleys so many of the county and state parks have payphones to ensure phone service.

pay phones can be useful (or be misused) for anonymous communication. Say as a whistleblower.

They also can be helpful when your mobile's battery runs out.

Wow I must be ancient. I remember a time when you could ask a fellow citizen if you can borrow their phone for a minute. I guess that's called a mugging now.

A time where you'd borrow a phone from a stranger "for anonymous communication, say as a whistleblower" rates not as ancient but as fictional.

I wonder how prevalent "turning someone in for a crime anonymously" was before the pay phones disappeared. Now I'm guessing it's damned near impossible.

That’s now called “I’d say no because of the scam where they use a premium number and bill you for a very expensive phone call.” If somebody’s phone is dead they can borrow my battery pack.

I did this recently after a marathon! It took me 10 minutes to remember my girlfriend’s phone number

And I had to text. Scam calls have made it far too unlikely that anyone picks up for an unknown number

NYC has these kiosks now https://www.link.nyc/

Which, if they are cellular based don't solve for the problem, but I suspect some are hardwired?

They have fiber backhaul since they are high-volume public wifi access points. I'd bet the phone tablet on the front is VoIP.

One problem is that, if you just keep and maintain "some" payphones, there probably won't be nearly enough to be useful if the cellular infrastructure is out for some reason.

That's why I still keep a landline, though the family rarely uses it. It so happened that my family was debating why we need a landline when each of us has one or two mobile connections. Co-incidentally, the next day a major city got flooded. Nearly all the cell towers in the flooded area got knocked out because the generators / UPS of the towers all conked out. Only the wired landlines worked. We all voted to keep the landline. (It also turned out to be a blessing because in some forms of the US embassy, landline is a required field).

On September 11th 2001 people lined up to use payphones because the cellular networks were overloaded.

Though I really like the idea of having some backup infrastructure already for those discussed simple cases like (top comment for example): car broke down and you.. .. forgot your mobile .. out of battery .. out of "credit" (in case of prepaid) .. cuz you got robbed .. cuz you got raped....(!) .. cuz you lost your fingertips and can't operate a touch display anymore.. .. possibilties are hopefully rare but endless but you're just in whatever emergency at 3 am and really need a to make a call!

But just for curiosity, whom/where you wanna call in 2022++ in case of overloaded networks like Sep. 11th in 2001. At least I didn't even "own" (actually set-up) my landline anymore.

were cell phones that common in 2001? i thought payphones were still more commonly used at that point

No. They were very expensive because the network had minuscule capacity compared with today. I remember having a consumer plan with a 400 minute per month quota and calls after 9 p.m. were free. Even with those tight limits you'd sometimes place a call and hear a switch message "All circuits are busy."

Yes, for average business people in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Not unusual for adults to have them, uncommon for students and children to have them.

sounds like BS, I was teenager in quite poor European country, in 1998-1999 I was one of the first two people in my class to have mobile (I've inherited Philips Fizz from father, my rich classmate had some Nokia), by 2001 when I served in military I was switching already two phones per year (I remember it because I traded one of the phones (Siemens) just during the leave in city where were my barracks), in 2001 literally every adult in poor European country except old seniors had already phone and definitely vast majority of teenage students

I learned about attacks when visiting netcafe (just some irrelevant foreign news) and then guys in my platoon were listening to radio and even our local TV channel strangely aired CNN footage instead south American telenovela guys watched for pretty girls. we had talk in evening with highest captain or mayor in our barracks in evening, we doubled our shifts to protect installations (guys were happy, at least they had someone to talk to legally during guarding) plus nearby nuclear power plant, first night of 9/11 I spent with unplanned night shift on the fax waiting for instructions from HQ and later was forced to guard as well despite as bureaucrat I should be pretty much exempted from it

In 2001 the US was at about 45 cell phones per 100 adults according to the ITU and statista.com (which may be the same dataset). Some other sites put it at 38% but unclear if total population or just US adults.

Regardless, hardly ubiquitous.

according this roughly 50% of European population had phone including seniors and children, so it pretty much confirms what I said that all adults except old people had phone including plenty of teenagers, Americas way behind Europe, but I guess US avg would be much higher than South America

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Regional-and-global-cell...

It saddens me that you can't think of a use for a communication device that doesn't track your every move in such detail that would make omniscient deities jealous.

I had an issue a while back where my mobile service got cut off and in the most well thought out support system I’ve seen, I needed to make a phone call to resolve it.

At first I couldn’t find anyone who’d allow me to make a call real quick. Luckily the phone worked fine and I still had wifi and was able to use Google voice, but if pay phones were still a thing I may have reached for one.

There are emergency phones all over school campuses these days, that only dial emergency service.

I do believe cell towers have ways to prioritize emergency number calls if their capacity is reduced, but I'm not sure of the details.

Are those emergency telephones, or the "press big button, speak into mic" public safety call posts? Can't order a pizza or call a cab on the latter I'm afraid.

I'm sure some college kids have tried to use it and classify it as a "pizza emergency"

How else are you supposed to get the next numbers from the machine?

yup - we definitely need to keep them. Otherwise Samaritan might win.

From earlier comments: https://www.link.nyc/ Each station allows free US calls.

Maybe the true solution is to have more than two providers?

> Are there any situations where it would be desirable to keep some payphones around?

If you happen to find yourself running from somebody named Mr. Anderson…

Haven’t pay phones been cell phones for quite a long time now?

Payphones were replaced with LinkNYC kiosks, https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/3/20/22985681/linknyc-5g-tower-...

> The LinkNYC buildout halted in 2018, with the majority of kiosks installed in relatively plugged-in Manhattan ... The company wound up unable to make its payments to the city, racking up a bill of $60 million. By 2019, the company faced bankruptcy ... The reboot of LinkNYC will add fifth-generation cellular network technology, on top of existing features like free Wi-Fi, a 911 button and USB chargers. Multiple telecom companies are in talks to house their 5G equipment in compartments in the upper chambers of the poles, Cannon said.

I hadn't thought about pay phones in a long time until early in the pandemic, when I was listening to the Phoebe Bridgers() song "Kyoto" that includes they lyrics
"You called me from a payphone / They still got payphones / it cost a dollar a minute"

and I realized "holy shit, when was the last time I saw a pay phone?" And I don't know the answer to that question. It might* be a weird one I saw at the end of a bar in a remote pub in Northumberland in the summer of 2019, in an area with dodgy cell service. I have NO idea when I last saw a real Ma Bell style pay phone anywhere.

(* Like most middle-aged men, I'm a fan. You laugh (I assume), but there was a definite non-parent adult contingent at her concert here last weekend. It seems weird for a south-of-30 songwriter tied very much to a certain sort of Millennial life to resonate so much outside the most obvious core demographic, but here we are.)

Or it could just be that Phoebe Bridgers has great music that everyone can enjoy :)

Obviously, I don't dispute this.

But for me, in a pre-subscription service world, I doubt I would've found her. What marketing formation for her that existed was kinda lean, and I don't automatically assume that every songwriter is gonna resonate with me. I mostly assume that people far removed from me probably WON'T, especially if the gap is huge. Bridgers is young enough to be my kid, and not in a cheeky "only if I knocked up a girl in high school" way. She's from a part of the country far from me, and works in a style that isn't immediately assumed to be universal.

And yet, here I am.

I'm kinda fascinated by issues around music discovery, and how they changed in my lifetime. I'm 52. My music-listening life probably started at 10 or 12, so let's just say 12 so it's a nice round 40 years ago.

Back then, you were a prisoner of what got played on the radio, but it was also SUPER weird for "adults" -- people my parents' age, typically born immediately before, during, or immediately after WWII -- to listen to popular music at all, and so there wasn't really any in the house. My parents didn't even own a stereo.

We had two "top 40" stations in town, but the playlists were not very different (at least they WERE locally programmed, unlike today). Precious little pop music was on TV; unlike today, when bands sometimes get huge exposure by having a song played in a popular show, it just didn't happen for whatever reason back then. (I suspect rights issues and the lack of cross-ownership between TV networks and music firms.)

And, obviously, there was no online music.

The world of pop music was also MUCH smaller. There was, for one thing, only about 20 years of the form -- probably less. I usually mark the start of modern pop music to 1966, but reasonable people can disagree on the specifics. The point is that the genesis point was sometime in the mid 60s, and we're talking about the early to mid 80s. It was simpler, with fewer subgenres, and next to nothing happening that wasn't part of the big-record-label A&R process. Recording was expensive and required lots of expertise. (Another act that's huge now, Billie Eilish, absolutely wouldn't have happened the way she's happened -- ie, recording her debuts in her childhood bedroom with only her brother as a collaborator. The rise of home recording tech is a whole OTHER world of miracles and wonders.)

And, finally, if you wanted to give a new act a try, you pretty much had to buy the record, so it cost money to discover.

Contrast that with now. I found Bridgers because I read a profile of her in the New Yorker (in my capacity as a white upper-middle-class tote-bag-owning urban liberal).

It was interesting partly because it was the first piece of "COVID-era" journalism I read. The New Yorker, if you're not familiar, is rightly famous for continuing to do the sort of long-form articles that used to be much more common, including in-depth profiles of interesting people. Sometimes they're famous, sometimes they're clearly on their way to being famous (like Bridgers) and sometimes they're scientists or something who will never be household names but who are still doing something very cool.

Usually these involve a writer hanging out with the person for several days over several weeks to kinda get to know them & etc, but obviously with COVID that didn't happen, and the way they managed it was interesting to me at the time (lots of Facetime). And it was after reading that that I realized I could just "hey Siri" some Bridgers for no additional incremental cost, and then I found myself playing "Punisher" over and over in a way I almost never have with a record since I was in my 20s.

There's something really interesting about how this worked to me. It's so VASTLY different than the world of music was when I was growing up that I'm fascinated by it, and by the "odd" (at least superficially) things that come out of it, like middle aged people finding and loving an act that, 30 years ago, probably wouldn't have been on their radar AT ALL because of her age, gender, and the sort of inevitable pigeonholing that labels would've done.

When I was in high school, the payphone (in the school) ate my quarter.

I called the operator and told them. I didn't care about the money, I just wanted a working phone.

A few weeks later I got a check in the mail for $0.25. It was on old letterhead from the telephone company's old name.

In Australia, Telstra (formerly publicly owned telephony company) has a regulatory obligation as the primary service provider to maintain pay phones which are reasonably accessible to everyone in the country. As of August 2021 they are free for domestic calls.

From the outside it looks totally backward to get rid of pay phones. You don’t use them until you need them. It costs little to maintain them and on balance it is a social good.

I talked to a guy who used to have hundreds of them across Florida in the 90s and made bank. He said he's down to six. Know where they are? In-patient drug rehab facilities. They take away your phone, and people are wary to try to make drug deals on landlines. The places where most of them still exist, however, are prisons and jails.

"LinkNYC kiosks also provide a social services directory, free phone calls within the U.S., ..."

"This content is not available in your country/region."

https://archive.today/XZ6rW

> The removal of public street payphones began in 2015 after the city acknowledged that advances in technology made them virtually obsolete.

Hey, congratulations on Manhattan for finally solving poverty and homelessness. I wonder which technology they used for that.

Not true. There's a couple around the corner from me on the UWS, including one that someone wrote a children's book about: https://www.amazon.com/Lonely-Phonebooth-Peter-Ackerman/dp/1...

EDIT: I was curious if they removed it in the last few days so I went out and took a picture: https://imgur.com/a/dQdSEzQ

Has a dial tone and everything. But maybe this is one of the private ones the article mentions?

Escaping the matrix becomes harder every year.

Nah, you can still do it via the LinkNYC terminals which let you place calls.

That said, it's vanishingly rare that I actually see anyone using them to make calls, and it looks kind of silly when you do use them because you need to plug headphones into the jack. Their primary utility is for device charging and free Wi-Fi.

- Use your personal device to connect to LinkNYC’s super fast, free Wi-Fi

- Access city services, maps and directions from the tablet

- Make free phone calls to anywhere in the U.S. using the tablet or the tactile keypad and microphone. Plug in your personal headphones for more privacy.

- Use the dedicated red 911 button in the event of an emergency

- Charge your device in a power-only USB port

[...]

Sounds cool! Wish we had terminals like these in Germany. Here, they just remove the pay phones, period.

I imagine that these could be useful to tourists who don't have a local phone plan, and the free Wi-Fi / USB charging / scrolling information bulletins are definitely useful, but I feel like this program came about 5-10 years too late for them to really shine now that a lot of people have smartphones with generous/unlimited data plans and don't necessarily need a kiosk for points 1-4.

From 2010-2017 or so, unlimited data plans were some combination of rare/slow/expensive, and especially in the early 2010s smartphones had a lot less penetration. I imagine these terminals would have been life-savers back then.

But this limited utility comes at a cost of being inundated by billboards. In NYC there is often 4 per single block - 2 on each side of the street. I don't believe there was a 1 for 1 replacement with the old kiosks, they seem to be far more pervasive than pay phones ever were. There's also a 5G version being introduced that is far more obtrusive than the original design. See pages 15, 16 and and 37 here:

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/designcommission/downloads/pdf/1...

In reality, they're:

- monolithic eyesores that take up precious sidewalk space

- yet another bright display running advertisements 24/7

- charging stations for the homeless to use and loiter around

Poor execution of a good idea. I smile whenever I walk by one that has been vandalized.

> monolithic eyesores that take up precious sidewalk space

To be fair, so were the pay phones they replaced. NYC just doesn't have enough sidewalk space in a lot of areas.

> - charging stations for the homeless to use

Isn't that a good thing?

The problem is that those are ultimately devices whose purpose is to feed the cancer that is called advertising, while old payphones merely wanted a quarter.

From their privacy policy (https://www.link.nyc/privacy-policy.html):

> We may share Technical Information that is unassociated with you and your device:

> With analytics, search engine, or other service providers that help us improve the Services; > To advertisers and advertising networks to select and serve relevant advertisements.

They're useless for anything besides 911 functionality. I would definitely not recommend connecting to its Wi-Fi service without a VPN and spoofed, one-time MAC address.

> whose purpose is to feed the cancer that is called advertising

Pay phones were the same way. The quarter payment was just on top of the money from advertisements.

That was just generic display advertising targeted by location and market research.

This one collects data about your usage of the device (and the mere fact that you were there at a certain time) and then shares it with lots of "partners" so they can refine the profile they have on you even further.

Well, when the phones were still operated by the regional Bells there was no advertising except for the logo of the phone company. The promotional advertising came only after the incumbents sold the kiosk business to Titan et al.

It seems like a pretty false equivalence to me. Who wants to talk to someone on speaker in the middle of a public street? Or remember to bring headphones with them in case they need to make a call? I would be very surprised if they were ever used to make calls outside of very rare emergency situations.

Well, it's not a "false equivalence" per se - the city literally installed the LinkNYC terminals right where the payphones used to be and considers them to be a successor to them - but I agree that the user experience of placing a call with the terminals is pretty bad. You don't get privacy, you (usually) have nowhere to sit, and if you're standing right in front of the terminal then you've got people constantly walking past you.

Frankly, I wasn't making any calls on the old payphones either, and it's been over a decade since I bothered memorizing a phone number, so I don't really feel qualified to pass judgment on whether they're that much better or worse. But I appreciate that the LinkNYC Wi-Fi access points are often easier and faster than those of the stores/cafes around them, and I appreciate being able to stop and charge up my phone a bit if it dies while I'm out and about. (Did this a lot during the Pokemon Go craze!)

This was a fun 2002 movie that would make no sense to zoomers:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183649/

it made no sense to anyone by then, in 2002 every adult who wanted the mobile had one already for few years, by then I've had already at least 3rd one and I was really poor, just finished my military service and had no work yet

after all phone booths were always seen mostly in American movies and no average person would use one in home country by 2000

I never understood that part about Matrix. They already had cellphones where they would discuss how to get to the nearest pay phone. Why not just use the cell phone to transmit ? Ah well, it wouldn't be as fun though especially that iconic scene where Trinity almost gets hit by a vehicle.

From an interview with the directors:

Sinclair: Why were they only able to jack in through hard-lines, but still able to communicate over cell?

WachowskiBros: Sinclair, good question! Mostly we felt that the amount of information that was being sent into the Matrix required a significant portal. Those portals, we felt, were better described with the hard lines rather than cell lines. We also felt that the rebels tried to be invisible when they hacked that’s why all the entrances and exits were sort of through decrepit and low traffic areas of the Matrix.

The full interview: https://www.matrixfans.net/movies/the-matrix/wachowski-broth...

More speculation by a fan about this: https://screenrant.com/matrix-phone-hard-line-enter-exit-exp...

Mirrors are still an option, presuming people are still keeping those around post pandemic.

Superman would have something to say about this, too.

Stu Shepard is fine with it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183649/

My first thought exactly when seeing this news!

It'll be interesting that in a few years that will become the most poorly aged portion of the movie.

Nope. The movie takes place in a recreation of 1999.

Yep. And Resurrections, which takes place in a recreation of 2021 (or thereabouts), allows for using cellphones to exit. They even make a point of pointing that out in the film. I think within the context of the movies, they made it very difficult for anything to "age poorly" like that because it's all meant to be a representation of a very specific point in time.

There are still some payphones around especially in the working class areas of LA. I think a payphone must still be the cheapest way to dial family in some countries. They all advertise their international rates at least.

I used to drunkenly urinate in those...

...No love for honesty, I guess.

Hopefully you use your personal cellphone now.

And now all of them needed to be removed!

So that joke in Futurama was true after all.

Lol, I love that you were honest.

It doesn't mean you should get praised for the other effects your actions had, but I do appreciate the honesty. Hopefully you now understand why people don't like others urinating in spaces where they possibly have to also occupy.

I remember back in my phreaking days, you were considered a rock star if you were able to steal a pay phone. I also remember writing down several payphone numbers and calling them at all hours to see who would pick up.

Its interesting in the article they don't address what the maintenance costs of these were, only they were "obsolete".

I do remember being in DT Minneapolis on a first date. Car broke down, cell phone was dead and we had to walk around for about an hour before finding a pay phone and being able to call a cab. It occurred to me at that point that payphones are largely ignored until you need them and you're thankful they're there.

We would call the pay phone at the front of Steak ‘n Shake and talk to whichever drunk person picked up. Very amusing in the 90s. Then, some of us got cell phones, and we could call from the parking lot and see who we were talking to, without them knowing who they were talking to.

For those in Europe ("this content is not available in your region" bullshit): https://archive.ph/XZ6rW

Not that we're missing much. The title says it all.

I'm actually shocked that they knew where all the pay phones were. I feel like they're going to announce in like a year that they messed up and found another one in like queens or something.

They're a platform for advertising that's all owned by the same company (Titan, which merged into the company that owns LinkNYC).

Advertisers keep good records.

The folks behind this advertising platform is much more of a Matryoshka doll though. Briefly, the history is that the contract to replace the pay phone kiosks was awarded to a consortium called CityBridge which consisted of Titan, Qualcomm, Comark and Control Group. Control Group and Titan then merged to form a company called Intersection. The lead investor in Intersection was Sidewalk Labs aka Alphabet aka Google. The CEO of of Sidewalk Labs is Daniel Doctoroff who was the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding under NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg. As always follow the money.

Well aware of this, without going into it all. -- I interviewed there some years ago. The manager at the time who was interviewing was a really cool dude but he moved on to Amazon since then.

Well someone has to empty them, right? So they must know where they are.

Per the article, there's some private payphones around still, so you might still see them.

Manhattan phonebooth memories- my father hoisting me up to stand on top of one to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, early 1980s. Where is Superman gonna change into his tights now?

The characters signing in with their unique splash screens at NYC pay phones in the movie Hackers was quite cool to 12 year old me.

I spent a stupid amount of time figuring out how to make a custom splash screen for Windows XP. And then a service pack reverted all my efforts. Good times.

that's right i forgot all about service packs. in the days before continuous patch delivery.

windows nt 4.0 sp #3 64mb installed

ooohlala

> This content is not available in your country/region.

Not cool

yes, but call it out and you typically get critizied as being some sort of horrible person calling for the US-centric forum to burn down.

https://archive.today/XZ6rW

The archived page is unusable (article text is blurred).

works fine for me I'm Kiwi browser with ublock

Payphones once dominated New York City street corners. Now, there’s only one public street payphone left in Manhattan — but not for long. Officials with the city, LinkNYC and other partners will remove the last payphone on Monday. A ceremony was expected to be held near Seventh Avenue and 49th Street. More NYC news The removal of public street payphones began in 2015 after the city acknowledged that advances in technology made them virtually obsolete. New York City officials partnered with LinkNYC to phase in free Wi-Fi stands and charging stations as a replacement. LinkNYC kiosks also provide a social services directory, free phone calls within the U.S., neighborhood-specific advertising and transit and weather alerts. You can still find some private payphones on public property in New York City as well as four full-length phone booths. This summer, LinkNYC plans to expand in New York City with its rollout of Link5G and additional kiosks in the outer boroughs as well as in Manhattan above 96th Street and in communities that lack internet access.

Maybe not worth your trouble, but adding NoScript to Chrome works for me.

It's one "valid" way of complying with GDPR.

Thoughts and prayers for Clark Kent

Here in the country of an encroaching police state, I recently learned that we do still have street ‘payphones’. And then, that they only work with special pay cards, and to buy one you need to provide your ID.

Quick! Get hold of a few! Save it for a film set in the 90's!

No. It is not the last. There is still one in the Upper West Side.

> This content is not available in your country/region.

Sad Internet.

I can imagine an incredibly rare situation where I need to use a payphone, it once happened to me.

I also know that I don't know any phone numbers but my own from memory.

The nation that sent men to the moon is only just now removing payphones from the most important part of its most important city?

The world is weird.

Payphones have been mostly gone for ages in NYC, there were just a few stragglers.

I don't see any connection between the moon and payphones, anyways.

Big nations move slowly. The future is not evenly distributed... yadda, yadda, yadda. Like in IT, nobody is interested in dealing with technical debt.

Yet it's impossible to imagine a nation with electric vehicle charging stations, and no more 'gas stations.'

https://archive.ph/XZ6rW

why not post while text if it's so short?

Payphones once dominated New York City street corners. Now, there’s only one public street payphone left in Manhattan — but not for long.

Officials with the city, LinkNYC and other partners will remove the last payphone on Monday. A ceremony was expected to be held near Seventh Avenue and 49th Street.

The removal of public street payphones began in 2015 after the city acknowledged that advances in technology made them virtually obsolete. New York City officials partnered with LinkNYC to phase in free Wi-Fi stands and charging stations as a replacement. LinkNYC kiosks also provide a social services directory, free phone calls within the U.S., neighborhood-specific advertising and transit and weather alerts.

You can still find some private payphones on public property in New York City as well as four full-length phone booths.

This summer, LinkNYC plans to expand in New York City with its rollout of Link5G and additional kiosks in the outer boroughs as well as in Manhattan above 96th Street and in communities that lack internet access.

Oops sorry I was also posting this, hadn't seen yours

Matrix would happen differently today

>> You can still find some private payphones on public property in New York City as well as four full-length phone booths.

That means the title is very misleading. This appears to be the end of the last publicly-available payphone on public land, not the last payphone in NYC. There just aren't any on the streets.

The title also specifically says Manhattan. Maybe there are still some in the other boroughs.

Here (Finland's 3rd biggest city) this happened on 29-Sep-2007, nearly 15 years ago.

Just for comparison. Most Finn's are very proud of being digital leaders, but I don't say it's really a good thing. Children, tourists, homeless etc. should be able to use a phone. Everybody should be able to communicate without leaving digital tracks. Surveillance capitalism is a sick model.

Everybody should have access to the Network. It's weird to prioritise a previous (and of course much less capable) iteration of the Network, in this case the Public Switched Telephone Network over the current one, the Internet.

Ambient Network Access is to be encouraged, I am disappointed when I see friends endeavouring to keep their young children from accessing the Network out of a misplaced fear it will stunt their intellectual development somehow. To be sure children need to be given boundaries and supervision, but preventing access is no sort of way to achieve that. For tourists and the homeless there's even less excuse.

Well, then you would need to advocate public internet terminals that can be accessed at reasonable cost.

Some countries have internet cafes, but Finland has never really had them to any extent because "too many" have internet at home (in the earlier days) or in their pocket (nowadays). Libraries do offer decent access, but sometimes you might have to wait 48 hours or more until it opens next time. And the density of libraries is of course nowhere close to what payphones once were. And you cannot have a confidential phone call in a library.

So in some aspects what you call the current iteration of the network is not much more capable for everyone, quite the opposite. At least 10% of the population (mostly elder people) are completely locked out here. Many more in other countries, but there often more alternative channels still exist.

next, cash.

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