From AM-NY:The mayor says there's still a place for pay phones in the 21st Century.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications launched the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge Wednesday, seeking urban designers, policy experts and engineers to update the phones' look and functionality.
Although the number of public payphones had decreased by 24,000 over the last 20 years thanks to cell phones, the mayor said they are critical during emergencies such as Superstorm Sandy.
(Except when the flood destroys the lines and the service is out for a month.)
4 comments:
Currently payphones have such low usage they frequently are broken.
In the final years of the necessary payphone (i.e. before cellphones), they were often terrifying to approach as they were used as "offices" by drug dealers. Eventually, most of them had to be labeled "no incoming calls on this phone"
The mayor says there's still a place for pay phones in the 21st Century.
Yes, and there's also a place for the telegraph, morse code, semaphore flags, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, rotary phones, and relay horesback messenger systems!
Who is going to get those numbers. Those phones include thousands of 212 numbers with tens of thousands of New Yorkers willing to pay for the caché of having a 212 number.
Payphones are not allowed to receive calls because they fear drug dealers will use them
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