The New York Times published a column last week questioning some fundamentals about the LinKNYC rollout. If you know anything about payphones in New York then you know that LinkNYC is the self-declared “payphone of the future”, replacing outdoor payphones with 9½ foot tall monoliths that offer free phone calls, free WiFi, and other interactive services.

First and foremost I take direct and well-informed issue with one assertion made by the Times: “Pay phones, which were to be replaced by kiosks, still litter the landscape, almost all of them unusable and stuffed with trash.”

It may be a matter of opinion to say that payphones “litter” New York. But to declare most of them “unusable and stuffed with trash” is simply false. Sure, I happened to spot a couple of phones that matched this description earlier this week. But to assert a majority of the City’s remaining payphones are in such a state suggests that not much research went into this article.

Give credit where due: Whatever else one can say about CityBridge and its flawed LinkNYC rollout the company has done a surprisingly decent job of keeping its remaining payphones operational.

As for the rest of the piece, it was good to see the Times identify everyday individuals who say they have come to rely on LinkNYC for connectivity. But left out of the discussion were so many questions this observer would love to have answered.

• Why did the president and other mid-level managers at Link quit earlier this year? I would not actually expect an answer to that, since it is none of my business. But it has been curious to see some of the founding members of LinkNYC move on with no real comment.
• Why did the rollout of new kiosks grind to a halt last summer?
• What, if any, penalties has DoITT leveraged against CityBridge for installing kiosks without ever activating them?
• CityBridge is now removing payphones and not replacing them with anything. Why?

LinkNYC will probably never shed its image as a taxpayer-funded program, however soundly facts contradict that assumption. All revenues come from advertising at no direct cost to the City, though you could make the case that DoITT’s administrative oversight of the program is paid for by tax dollars.

LinkNYC’s only other revenue stream so far had been the short-lived Shoutable app, discontinued after just a few months. I might have asked CityBridge what went wrong with that app to warrant its abrupt cessation.

The Times refers to the discovery in May of code on GitHub that appeared to include the ability to track someone’s exact location. This had activists thinking they found their privacy-invading/people-tracking smoking gun to prove once and for all that CityBridge is an evil, data-scooping monster.

It didn’t really work out that way. My guess is that this code had something to do with the above-mentioned Shoutable app, which needed t o know your location for it to work.

The city pays nothing for the kiosks. In return CityBridge gets a long-term monopoly franchise that I have characterized in the past as reeking of “unearned municipal privilege.” I stand by that assessment. The dozen or so independent payphone service provider that the City forced out of New York to make way for the CityBridge monopoly never had a chance to compete against this big-moneyed/deep-pocketed entity. It’s unfortunate there will be no competition in this space, so long as the CityBridge monopoly franchise endures.

The Times article touches on the topics of privacy and surveillance, floating Big Brother suspicions about LinkNYC that the franchise simply cannot seem to shake. Advertisements are not targeting individuals and they never will. That’s just not how targeted advertising works in the DOOH space.

Juan Rodriguez’s “smash-spree” of 42 kiosk screens is called out as something of a turning point in the public’s realization that yes, indeed, these things have video cameras and they are watching you. By my fuzzy math Rodriguez’s destruction of those advertising screens cost CityBridge in excess of a quarter million dollars. Whatever his motives I think it’s fair to say he was not worried about the surveillance capabilities of those machines.

My other questions:

• Why does CityBridge publish a dataset of LinkNYC Kiosk status when the information contained has little connection to reality?
• What percentage of ads (versus trivia and art) typically rotate through the big screens? By my observation the answer is not many. I’ve only published a few results from my surveys of how many ads show up on LinkNYC screens, but the unpublished surveys are consistent with those published.
• How long will the phone calling feature work during a blackout? By my analysis of data regarding the Upper West Side blackout earlier this year that answer is not very long, and nowhere near as reliably as traditional copper landline payphones.
• What ever happened to the solar-powered pilot program?

  I actually know the answer to this one, thanks to the one FOIL request I ever made that got a meaningful response from DoITT.

  The LinkNYC pilot plan involved putting solar panels on a handful of kiosks in the Bronx. The goal was to see how long kiosks could stay alive during a power outage running only on solar-powered battery backup. You would think this kind of planning might have preceded the installation of these kiosks on public property but no.

  The pilot program concluded that the kiosks would not stay alive long enough to be useful in an emergency. That is not surprising given the power-hungry nature of these machines. The same cannot be said of the solar-powered 100% off-the-grid payphones that LinkNYC will replace.

  The kiosks’ alleged ability to maintain functionality under emergency circumstances was a key selling point in getting the City to approve wholesale routing of every payphone in favor of LinkNYC machines. It turns out these Smart City beasts can’t even perform up to the standards of the old payphones.

And the beat goes on.

I’ve become personally acquainted with a number of people lately who have their own bones to pick with LinkNYC. Unlike those folks I don’t want to see the program implode. Even if I did that would almost certainly never happen under the terms of the monopoly franchise agreement.

I just wish LinkNYC was a better product.