An abandoned payphone can be more than a distraction.

Abandoned payphones can become genuine safety hazards.

I would not want to let small children get too close to this payphone, located outside a family-friendly electronics store.

With its sharp edges and exposed wires this object could be dangerous to playful hands.

I have been contacted in the past by private investigators and district attorneys who used information from this web site to help prove that a payphone once existed at a specific location. I don’t always know the details of the litigation, but in one instance someone was sued for doing a poor job of removing a payphone from a sidewalk.

When properly removed you should see little more than some metal spikes in the sidewalk where a payphone used to be. Even those should be shaved down and flattened.

When poorly removed you might see a 4- or 5-inch portion of a payphone enclosure’s metal base jutting out of the sidewalk. These little metal sticks in the ground create obvious safety hazards for pedestrians.

I know that information from this web site contributed to a few such lawsuits. I never kept track of the outcomes of these cases.

Let me make this simple request to independent payphone service providers, even though most of you have probably skipped town by now: Clean up after yourselves. These abandoned payphones could cause bodily harm, and could land someone in court.