There is nothing funny about a missing person poster. But I had to laugh when I saw that someone used one such sign to share their thoughts on a matter near and dear to me, and perhaps to readers of this web site. It was not I who wrote these words. I don’t do vandalism. But someone saw fit to scrawl the words “WE NEED MORE PAY PHONES” on this missing person sign in a New York City subway station.
The message even inspired a reply from another vandalous straphanger, who etched the words “Yes! Not everyone has a phone!”
I cannot tell if the sentiments expressed here are truly genuine. The initial call for “more pay phones” might have been written as a joke but the affirmative reply seems sincere. And true. Not everyone has a cell phone and some people who do are not always able to maintain control of it or keep it charged. I believe that the public interest would be best served with a quantity of landline public phones that are free to use for limited-length local calls and able to make coin- or credit card-paid long distance calls. I also think that public libraries should offer telephone rooms where Luddites with library cards can make limited-length VOIP calls to any phone in the United States.
This incongruous message in the photo above appeared at the Queens Plaza E/M/R station. That station actually happens to be one of the few in the MTA system with working payphones. When I saw this sign yesterday there was one non-working TTY payphone in the area by the token booth (I still call it that even though subway tokens are long gone). The other two phones, which worked the last time I tried them, are behind the turnstile. I did not feel like paying the $2.75 subway fare just to see if they worked.
New York actually has the highest payphone population of any American city. Numbers are changing fast as payphones are being routed to make way for LinkNYC devices, the advertising platform nobody asked for and that has been described as the “payphone of the future”. Data released in 2013 and updated by the City in August, 2016, show 6169 outdoor payphones; but that information was inaccurate and outdated when released 3 years ago. The inflated number of payphones shown in the City’s map was used as political fodder to push the LinkNYC program through, with promises of free Wi-Fi everywhere phantom payphones appeared to be on that map. The actual coverage of LinkNYC will be far less than what appears on the oft-cited map of pay telephone locations, which is emulated on the Link.NYC home page (scroll down past the video). The real number of outdoor payphones in NYC today probably hovers closer to 4000 or less, concentrated mostly in well-trafficked areas where advertising revenue is highest.
Most outdoor payphones in New York are owned by CityBridge and Telebeam. Telebeam, which has been in the business since 1984 (the earliest days of payphone deregulation), has litigation pending against the City and Citybridge for what it believes is an illegal monopoly on its LinkNYC program. It seems likely that the company will be ushered out of business and its assets confiscated, as happened to several other independent payphone service providers.
Here is the full poster for the missing person, shared for the extremely unlikely chance that someone reading this happens to have seen the individual in the photos:
