New York City’s Payphone Locator takes data from the city’s map of PPT (Public Pay Telephone) Locations and uses it as a starting point for a fuller, more comprehensive overview of where Gotham payphones really are in this year of 2015.

I was happy but surprised when New York City first released its PPT dataset and map in 2012. I had requested such a release many months earlier but was wholly ignored. After the events of superstorm Sandy I resubmitted the request, citing the need for working public telephones in times of crisis. That time around the city quickly issued the dataset, though I do not know how much urgency my request in particular brought to the matter.

The first release of the PPT Location data was interesting but, on closer analysis, a little disappointing. It was filled with errors and omissions. Payphones removed years earlier appeared on the map, while phones located in places like subway stations, bus terminals, and airports were not included at all.

The first release of the PPT Locations dataset seemed like a good start, and I imagined that over time its quality would improve.

Quality has improved but in its most recent release last month the dataset is still filled with references to public phones that disappeared years ago. Based on a survey comparing the PPT map’s payphone locations to what is actually on the streets of western Queens, for example, I would guesstimate that at least 30-35% of the data is bad.

Originally released in the wake of Sandy the PPT dataset today has a new relevance. LinkNYC — a consortium of technology and advertising companies — is planning to replace the city’s army of payphones with more modern devices offering gigabit Wi-Fi access and other communication and information services. This has a lot of people looking at the city’s map of payphone locations as some kind of blueprint for how and where this municipal Internet-everywhere service will be distributed.

Skeptics of LinkNYC are few — or maybe we are overwhelmed by the barrage of propaganda that heralded the city’s approval of the program — but the voices of dissent in this matter sound clearer and more believable to me than the rah-rah rhetoric of its supporters.

Promises of job creation and revenue forecasts for this advertising-supported program are suspiciously rosy, while the checkered relationship some members of the LinkNYC consortium have had with city and state agencies should be a point of concern.

Flying in to that already murky political maelstrom are accusations of cronyism, conflict of interest, and municipally sanctioned monopoly that will almost certainly be talking points in the inevitable lawsuits facing the city.

And something that most observers would probably not know is that the payphone service provider chosen for this coalition has a horrible track record (compared to other New York City payphone service providers) of simply keeping its payphones operational. Look for the LinkNYC “Links” to be as reliable as payphones of today.

The PPT Locations dataset is reasonably large (comprising over 6,000 records) but it doesn’t seem so big that such a high percentage of fundamental errors should slip through. Smaller, less significant errors appear here and there, as would occur in any sizeable data product of this sort, but for the city to use its error-filled map to build enthusiasm for replacing payphones that do not even exist seems either weirdly cynical or selectively ignorant.

So I finally decided to start a project of fixing it up. Creating my own set of maps I stuffed the dataset into WordPress and quickly removed over 30 payphone locations that I knew right off the bat did not exist. Focusing on western Queens (an area I know best) I found wide swaths of space filled with phantom payphones (according to the city’s map). The The New York City Payphone Locator‘s version of the map (only for western Queens, as of now) paints an entirely different picture of Gotham’s public telephone landscape today, and perhaps a different picture of how much coverage LinkNYC’s promise of free Internet-for-all will truly have.

I do not expect to canvass all 5 boroughs of New York, checking off over 6000 payphones for their existence or lack thereof, all by myself. You can help. If you want to take a crack at editing The New York City Payphone Locator please visit the site to learn more. In a lot of cases verifying a payphone’s existence (or lack thereof) can be done entirely through Bing’s Streetside or Google’s Streetview. Having explored this for a few days I find that there is a certain technique to it, that sometimes you simply have to go to the physical location of the alleged payphone, and neither of those reality-scrapers is entirely reliable for something like this. With enough interest shown I will open the site’s underlying database to public editing.

Contact me here.