I made it over to Newark on Sunday for, among other reasons, a bit of payphone hunting as well as a quick check-in on the newly activated LinkNWK kiosks. I was interested in seeing what services the tablet offered that would differ from LinkNYC’s collection of apps. I’m happy to report I found a decent quantity of working payphones at Newark’s Penn Station and on Market Street, but the freshly minted LinkNWK machines were not so promising. Half did not work and the other half was monopolized by the homeless. I mean that as a joke, obviously, since there are presently only two activated kiosks in Newark, one on Rector Street and the other on Broad.

The first kiosk I encountered showed a “Hang tight!” message on the tablet, and both ad panels were dark.

This image of the second kiosk seems to show that LinkNWK’s machines are already the same magnet for homeless people to charge their cell phones as LinkNYC, which CBS2 reported on a couple of weeks ago. This dude was at the LinkNWK kiosk for at least 45 minutes, this on a pretty cold and blustery day.

Newark is expected to see 45 LinkNWK kiosks, which seems like a relatively sane quantity compared to New York’s ludicrous goal of 10,000 machines, one located every 50 feet. But with only 45 machines planned for Newark it is easy to see a future where a majority of the kiosks will be monopolized by a small number of people.

While neither of the two LinkNWK kiosks were available to me I did find that payphones at Penn Station are not only relatively plentiful, but also pretty busy. I also spotted a rare piece of “LOVE GOD” scratchiti, which has been something of a long-term obsession for me. I’ll have more on that in another posting.

I had some issues with the CBS2 report about LinkNYC, not least of all for its unabashed anti-homeless tone. But in substance I found the reporting suspect. One image they used to illustrate the “problem” is from over two years ago, and shows someone not even charging his phone but watching a video on YouTube. I know exactly when that photo was taken because I’m the one who took it. The image was lifted with no permission or proper attribution from this story I wrote in 2016. There is no question that the image below from the CBS2 segment is the same as the one that follows.

The image of mine has been stolen before, and in fact I think CBS2 might have lifted it from someone who stole it from me. I don’t care except to point out that if this image is over two years old then maybe other reportage from CBS2 on this matter was sourced from outdated anecdotes and imagery. The homeless do camp out by these machines but CBS2 made it look more epidemic than the reality.

Then again LinkNYC’s decision to make its president or anyone else unavailable for comment illustrates yet again the cloister-like disconnect that keeps the so-called Smart City isolated from and aloof to its people. As with the encampments that formed around the Internet web browser in 2016 LinkNYC is choosing, publicly at least, to ignore the problem, although I would iterate that I don’t think it is quite the epidemic CBS2 tried to make it seem.

CBS2 suggests that the phone charging ports should be disabled, or perhaps time-limited. This is something I predicted would happen two years ago, after the Internet browser was removed.

The city’s response, that LinkNYC is available to all citizens regardless of their housing status, sounds like a not-so-subtle attempt to shame CBS2 for even airing this segment. But it ignores the more realistic potential consequence of these kiosk campers, which is that they monopolize the kiosks and make them unavailable or undesirable to a growing number of New Yorkers who have come to associate these machines with the homeless. In certain situations the presence of these individuals camped out curbside causes obvious hazards.

I reported a few weeks ago that new installations and activations of LinkNYC kiosks seems to have stalled. This appears to remain true, assuming the datasets provided by CityBridge to the NYC.gov Open Data site are accurate. This cessation also coincides with the recent demolition of the LinkNYC manufacturing facility that used to be located on 31st Avenue in Astoria. Maybe they can afford to slow down from the breakneck pace at which these kiosks were being erected, with as many as 100 a month going up before stopping altogether. In April CityBridge was granted another 2 years to meet its goal of installing as many as 10,000 LinkNYC kiosks. But the longer they delay resuming installations the more it seems like it could become mathematically or logistically impossible to meet such goals.

As for LinkNWK in Newark I will try again. I had to stop writing here for a while on account of an eye injury and other small calamities.