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Comment by LordOmlette | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

> 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.

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 :)

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

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.

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. :)

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