Link in a Box

At first glance I thought this LinkNYC kiosk, at Varick and Charlton Streets, had been dressed up in plywood as some kind of guerilla art installation, akin to somebody cloaking a Williamsburg kiosk in Teletubby regalia in September, 2019. As far as I know the perpetrator of that Teletubby intervention never came forward, perhaps because the prank was not received with much enthusiasm.

Alas, the plywood encasement of this kiosk was no statement by an anonymous provocateur. CityBridge, or one of its contractors, wrapped this kiosk in plywood panels to protect it from falling debris. A work order posted at 180 Varick Street indicates a façade restoration of the building will soon commence. Scaffolding surrounding the building should collect most of the falling debris, but the sidewalk and street below should still be littered with ash and stone flecks from the façade restoration.

With access to the tablet and phone calling features cut off I assume the WiFi remains available. The advertising panels, of course, remain visible, as do the air intake and exhaust vents.

WHITHER LINKNYC?

I have not given a whole lot of attention to LinkNYC the past year or so, given the state of the world in which we’ve lived. I made a video a couple of months ago in which I checked in on the state of LinkNYC machines at the time. I promptly forgot about making that video until this Link in a box reminded me of it. Look for it on my YouTube channel sometime soon.

It seems nothing has changed about the kiosks in almost three years. In that time I don’t think a single new feature has been added to the tablet or to the big advertising panels. Features on the tablet that do not work as expected have not been fixed. The only change might be that the font size on the tablet screen increased by a point or two.

last year I suggested, via NYC.gov/data’s feedback form, that someone might want to clean up some of the LinkNYC datasets published at the OpenData portal. The LinkNYC Kiosk Status dataset, which claims to give a snapshot of how many kiosks are working and which ones are not, is filled with errors and omissions, and has been since the day it was published.

In reply I was told the dataset had been cleared of all errors and omissions. A cursory scan of the data showed this was simply not true. Nothing changed about that dataset.

In the past I had published a more readable version of that dataset, thinking it might be useful for anyone planning to use LinkNYC’s WiFi and scouting out which ones worked and which did not.

But the data provided was so clearly inaccurate I couldn’t publish it here in good faith.

I also suggested of nyc.gov/data that they publish a schedule of payphone location removals, so those who might still use them knew ahead of time, and for own self-interest in documenting as many phones as I can before they go.

Nothing came of that request.

IS LINKNYC DEAD?

To outside observers the LinkNYC program seems to have come to a halt. Data published at NYC.gov, which I assume to be accurate (though I don’t know why I should), shows the last new kiosk installation occurred in April, 2019; and that only two new kiosk installations took place that entire year. The once rapid clip of installations, at one point numbering over 100 a month, slowed to a trickle during the summer of 2018, then ceased altogether almost a full year before the pandemic.

The only real activity in turning on new kiosks in the past year or so involved 50+ machines that had been installed but never activated, some of them having served as nothing but roadwart for over 4 years. The City is said to have fined CityBridge for these non-working kiosks but the amount of those penalties was never made public.

Other than turning on those long-inactive machines there has been no visible progress in the LinkNYC rollout. It now seems impossible within the remaining time of its 12-year contract that CityBridge could ever reach its contractual obligation of 7,500 installations, and we can forget about its stated goal of installing over 10,000 of them.

Meanwhile the removal of payphones, also owned by CityBridge, has resumed its rapid clip with not a single payphone replaced with a LinkNYC kiosk. This leaves wide swaths of New York with no access to emergency communication devices should anything bad ever happen, which of course it never will.

Further evidence suggesting LinkNYC is dead comes from an observation I and others made recently. In the past when a payphone was removed a giant plywood pylon took its place, sometimes with a notice posted on it saying that “Free WiFi” was coming soon. Some of those wood pylons rotted in place for years.

Since last year the wood pylons had been replaced by less intrusive yellow mats.

But recent months have seen the site of payphone removals followed by nothing but a concrete smear, suggesting that no LinkNYC kiosk is expected to replace them.

I have not kept as close an eye on Link rollouts in other cities, which presently number only two. But according to Cities.LINK it looks like Newark’s quantity of kiosks has stagnated at 4, while Philadelphia’s number may have actually increased. As of yet I’ve not found published datasets for those cities with exact dates of new installations.

I’ll have more details and examples about all this after I polish off the video I made a few months ago.