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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?"
... payphones are great to have in an emergency - and there are tens of millions of people in the US w/o a cellphone.
The real question is: are they going to keep operating those phones that lose them money? Should payphones be thought of as something essential like public transportation, and possibly subsidized by the govt?
They are available online, ebay, etc. The only trouble is, they have been "adjusted" to not require coins. If you were to want to make it a real pay phone, you would need the totalizer circuitry (not something the phone cos want to have in the wild ... look up the term "red box") and a ACTS phone line - convincing the telco to do that for you would be difficult....
c kTheWizKid
Just my 90-cents-for-the-first-three-minutes-worth...
Ri
the payphone out in the Middle of Nowhere already disappeared. Here is a link to the going-away of it and why. Basically, the National Park Service and the Mojave National Preserve thought that there would be too much environmental impact if the booth remained too much longer.
--Fuzz
This should be modded up.
That was such a stupid step to take, unless they were looking for everyone to add just one more thing to the list of the benefits of having a cell phone. Payphones always have had two advantages in my mind:
1: They are wired, hence, no fuzz.
2: Just one shiny thing and you could get a call through.
Now that it's 50 cents, I find myself approaching a payphone and finding that I don't have the right amount of change on me. Who cares that it's unlimited? The three minute limit was just fine by me. I'm not exactly making leisure calls at a pay phone. The trade off is ridiculous and is bound to doom the payphones.
I only agree if the cell user is not using a headset and using a phone with special hands free dialing features. Otherwise, we might as well ban conversation between 2 or more occupants of a car.
They should convert them into WiFi hotspots.
Perhaps a more direct metaphor is in order: You're picking up litter in a burning building.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Indeed, if you search, there are quite a few pay phones on ebay. Pretty impressive.
Payphones have all but disappeared around London, since so few calls are made on them and almost everyone has a cell phone. This trend started years ago. When I was last in London cellphones even worked down in the Tube.
One thing disappearing payphones would mean: One more parking place available at finer gas stations and 7-11's everywhere.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
San Jose Mercury story: hundreds of mailboxes removed from San Francisco bay area, due to low usage, garbage thrown in mailboxes, fear of more anthrax attacks, etc. etc. I can't help worrying about all anonymous means of communication shutting down.
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
How about junking hundreds of thousands or millions of cellphones. Plus the batteries each unit may go through in a lifetime. There's no way those things last as long as a nice clunky pay phone. I know we have a couple of dead ones around here somewhere, and a lot of people upgrade simply for fashion or features.
Yes, people are looking into recycling the phones. It's difficult because the materials are so heterogeneous, and though a few like tantalum are quite valuable, the labor to break up the phones can outweigh that. A nicer idea -- hand-me-downs to less wealthy developing countries, for sale or parts. Cellular phones have a disproportionate value in countries that never got the telephone line infrastructure in the first place.
The U.S. mobile market may be chaotic because of all of the different "standards" here (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN, PCS [aka CDMA-1900]), but the competition for customers is so fierce that the companies are doing this.
Mind you, the peak minutes are expensive (I get 400 minutes for $40 and extra minutes are 45 cents), and incoming calls are tallied against that as well -- except during off peak time.
I was in Manhattan on 9/11/2001 and I know that there were lines at the pay phones everywhere. My cell phone and landline were down most of the day, but I assume the people on the pay phone were getting through to their loved ones?