Requiem for the Disappearing Pay Phone

StarEmperor writes "This Washington Post article describes the steady disappearance of pay phones as cell phones become more commonplace. Many pay phones, which used to generate hundreds of dollars per month in revenue, are now used so infrequently that they cost money to operate. I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?"

Comments

Sorry -- your living in the 80's

[Codex The Sloth]

1. Terrorists and other street criminals don't use public telephones -- mostly they don't work, it's inconvenient and there's no privacy.

2. Criminals use stolen cell phones to make their calls and throw them away every couple of days.

Re:"School" payphone case mods

[Mister Transistor]

Actually, it really is a genuine "Red Box". The REAL coin-tone generator circuit board in a real Ma Bell payphone is in fact in a red plastic box. That's where the term "Red Box" came from.

Re:where can I get one?

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

I've also heard these days that the phones turn off the handset microphone until you've paid up, so you need to do some funky tricks to get your signal in.

Tim

Re:Without public telephones...

[marcsiry]

That was actually a hilarious moment in the first Superman movie- Clark Kent was rushing to change into Superman for his first "public action" (saving Lois from a helicopter disaster) when he stopped and briefly glanced up and down at one of the half-booths common in NYC nowadays (and back in the 70's when the film was made).

It obviously didn't fit his requirements, as he went on to a revolving door which he spun at super speed to blur his transformation (which seems moot, after opening his shirt in the middle of a crowded street to reveal the Superman "S.")

Oh well, it's NYC, err, Metropolis-- no one would notice unless he was doing something abberant, like being nice or polite...

Re:pay phones might get more use if

[stickyc]

One thing to add - I'm not sure if this still applies (I was told this in the mid 90's), but in California, Pay Phones have 'priority' over other phones in case of emergency. This means that if there's some major catastrophy (IE - earthquake for us CA folk), the phone in your house may not get a connection, but the pay phone usually will.

This is, of course, dependent on the connection. If you buy one from EBay and stick it in your house, you'll get the same busy signal as the rest of us while the china falls from the cupboards.
Just something to note when the stuff hits the fan.

Re:The environmental hazard of removing payphones

[Hal-9001]

Hands-free sets do not make driving while talking on a cell-phone any safer. See this paper from the New England Journal of Medicine for details. Basically, they cross-correlated traffic accident reports with cell phone logs and found that talking on a cell phone while driving quadruples the risk of getting in an accident, regardless of whether or not the phone is hands-free. This increased risk of accident is comparable to the increased risk of accident while driving drunk.

The difference between talking on a cell phone and talking with a passenger is that the passenger is aware of the driving situation and can halt the conversation and/or call the driver's attention to the road in case of emergency.