Pay phones in New York City are a dying breed. Aboveground, nearly everyone has a cell phone, and pay phones, with their quaint request for a quarter, have fallen into disrepair. Most are extremely dirty, and many do not work. Underground, where cell signals do not yet permeate, the story is much the same. In fact, a Straphangers survey earlier this year found that a third of all pay phones in the subway’s 40 busiest stations simply do not work.
Now, as Verizon looks to exit the pay phone business, the future for these underground communications lifelines may be short-lived. An article published last week by the Dow Jones Newswire didn’t gain much attention, but it features a key bit of information on the city’s subway system. Verizon is going to sell its NYC pay phone network to a California-based company called Pacific Telemanagement Services, and the buyers would like to disconnect all of the phones in the subway system. “At MTA, there’re many, many more phones in place than are justified,” Thomas Keane, the head of PTS, said.
While I saw an earlier version of the story that claimed PTS may shutter the subway pay phones, the company says it remains committed to keeping the city’s most popular phones up and running. Greg Bensinger had more on the impact this sale may have on underground pay phones:
Among Verizon’s more frequented pay phones are those on New York’s underground subway platforms, where wireless signals mostly don’t reach, Keane said. Under PTS management, some of those pay phones would be closed or turned into kiosks with commuter information, he said, noting the firm will have to negotiate those terms with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority…
Still other perils lie ahead for pay phones. In New York, the MTA has already rigged six subway stations with wireless service and plans to similarly retrofit all 277 stations by 2016. And Washington’s Metro this year said it would remove nearly all of the pay phones in its system, about 1,000, after failing to reach terms on a new contract with Verizon.
“People tend to forget about pay phones, until their cellphone doesn’t get a signal, until there’s a natural disaster or other emergency,” Keane said. “We want to make sure there’s a future with pay phones where Americans need them.”
Because the MTA has a service contract with Verizon that will, in all likelihood, be assigned to Pacific Telemanagement Services upon completion of the sale, the MTA won’t be losing its pay phones any time soon. Removals will, as the article said, have to be negotiated. Yet, it’s easy to see how forces are aligning against the pay phone. Cell service is available at a handful of underground stations, and that number should swell to around 36 within the next 12 months. Furthermore, the MTA is ready to move forward with its Help Point Intercom pilot to provide better emergency response underground. Only those looking to reach a person aboveground to talk business or pleasure will need a pay phone.
For now, I can’t get too worked up over the eventual death of the subway pay phone, if that truly comes to pass. Verizon has removed pay phones in the system for years, and stations as popular as 42nd St.-Bryant Park and West 4th St. have seem their phones removed for good. Meanwhile, it’s tough for me to imagine a scenario that would cause me to place a subway pay phone in contact with my ear or mouth.
Yet, the pragmatist in me hears faint stirrings of worry over emergency situations in which contact with the outside world is impossible. Do we live in a city ready to give up its underground pay phones? Perhaps not.
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