[andjd]

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.

[enobrev]

> 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.

[mike22]

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.

[IMSAI8080]

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.