The Payphone Project has said for years that payphone locations should be made public, yet no one listens because most people do not care about public telephones until they actually need one.

Images from lower Manhattan of people waiting in line to use payphones in areas hit hardest by superstorm Sandy have thrown a refreshing, if illusory light on payphones and issues of access to communication in emergencies. Some who regarded public telephones as irrelevant now may recognize that the wholesale routing out of public telephones creates dangers to public safety. I believe this is true not just in large scale emergencies but in the everyday lives of citizens who simply lost or forgot to bring their cell phone with them and find themselves stranded because of it.

I think cities and governments should subsidize or enforce the establishment of public interest payphones in conformance with the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996. The otherwise largely outdated 1996 Telecom Reform Act concludes:

“… payphones unquestionably serve critical public interests in health, safety and welfare. It is possible, however, that reliance on the market may fail to provide adequately for payphones in locations serving important public needs, because some payphones providing these benefits may not be economically self-supporting.”

The “economically self-supporting” payphone no longer exists. The business of coin-paid and credit-card paid calls from payphones is gone, with phones today subsidized largely by display advertising on payphone kiosks.

“For these reasons, we establish criteria by which the states may maintain and fund public interest payphones in locations serving health, safety, and welfare goals, where they would not otherwise exist as a result of the operation of the market.”

Today we could include virtually every payphone in America as one that would “not otherwise exist as a result of the operation of the market”. The payphone “market” is dead. Payphones have been routed out across the country largely on account of their inability to make money. New Yorkers and Manhattanites in particular could consider themselves lucky to have payphones at all. The amount of eyeballs passing by makes the kiosks attractive to advertisers who largely subsidize the business. In smaller cities and rural areas people would most likely find themselves entirely cut off from telephone service in a large scale emergency.

Profitability should not be relevant to the discussion — it should not at all be part of the discussion of ensuring access to communication in emergencies.

The day-to-day landscape of telecommunications has changed significantly since 1996, when the Telecom Reform Act was written. Payphones in particular have been marginalized by many, and even forgotten by The Internet.

The principles, however, of establishing public interest payphones “in the interest of public health, safety, and welfare” remain.

Superstorm Sandy might be the marquee event I always imagined would bring the issue into focus. Or this might just be a passing footnote to the far more significant story of what happened here.

Contrary to common public derision public telephones still serve a legitimate customer base. Some 27,000,000 calls were made from New York City payphones in 2011, with a substantial number of 911 calls also coming from public phones.

Yet most folks never seem to think of payphones or consider them useful until they really need one.

I have made various attempts over the years to find official sources of payphone location data, but no public access to this information seems to be available. Many years ago I received large donations of said information from insiders with access to law enforcement and phone company databases. That collection of some 750,000 payphone numbers and locations proved genuinely useful over the years, assisting in things like solving crimes and tracking down runaways. The data today is largely outdated but kept online for historical purposes, where the old information still sometimes proves useful at times.

In 2004 I told the New York Times that the telecoms should release their databases of public telephone locations in the interest of helping people determine where threatening or suspicious calls originated. Off the record I also cited the events of September 11, 2001, to suggest that having a map of local payphone locations should be a small part of anyone’s disaster planning.

Verizon, in response, dismissed the suggestion, saying that it was not in their interest to make that data public.

More recently I used New York’s Open Data website to suggest that the city release a dataset of PPT (Public Pay Telephone) locations in the interest of disaster planning. That suggestion never appeared on the web site and was ignored.

For the moment, at least, the effects of hurricane Sandy have put a small spotlight on public telephones. Will this incident signal a turning point in public attitudes and government policy toward payphones? I doubt it. Technology fetishism is incorrigible. Some would stand in line for hours waiting for access to a power outlet to recharge their smartphone devices before submitting themselves to using a public telephone. Those folks are not going to be public telephone advocates under any circumstances. With virtually no money at stake the payphone business is unlikely to attract evangelists or political lobbyists, even as their value to the public in emergencies is, however briefly, clearer than ever.