I made an unexpected and genuinely surprising discovery yesterday. Despite signage to the contrary it is no longer possible to access 711, the Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS), from New York City payphones. The TRS is a free service, explicitly mandated by the FCC to be available from all public pay telephones, that makes it possible for people with hearing or speech impediments to make and receive phone calls. Access to 711 used to be available from all of its payphones, connecting you to a live person who would serve as an intermediary in the conversation. CityBridge, for whatever reason, decided to disable it, an apparently direct and intentional violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
If one needs evidence that CityBridge’s payphones are expected to allow access to 711 one needs look no further than the phones themselves. The blue information cards below the handset all state clearly that 711 should connect to “Relay centers for the hearing/speech impaired”.
Dialing 711 from a LinkNYC kiosks used to do nothing. Now it sends callers to a modem-like sound which I cannot identify. If this is an attempt to connect to a TTY device then this connection makes no sense, since LinkNYC does not and cannot accommodate such a thing. This means CityBridge is violating the ADA on two fronts, its payphones and its Smart City kiosks.
UPDATE, 2/10/2020: LinkNYC kiosks actually do connect to a live person when dialing 711. However it takes about 2 minutes of listening to modem noises before the call is recognized as a voice call and not TTY. I don’t know how many people would be aware that the modem sound eventually gives way to a live person. There is no reason calls from LinkNYC kiosks to 711 should not go straight to a live operator.
As of recently the kiosks do, however, offer the Video Relay Service.
Dialing the N11s from CityBridge’s phones have always produced erratic results. 211 is supposed to connect to a New York state social services hotline. Sometimes it does, other times you get sent to a spammy “You won a 3-day cruise” line. Other times dialing 211 might result in a recorded message saying to deposit 50¢. I never paid that 50¢ so I don’t know where those calls would have gone.
311 seems to work consistently from CityBridge payphones, connecting to the City’s non-emergency service requests. 411 Directory Assistance seems to work but at 75¢ a pop I’ve never stayed connected to it. 511, which would connect to the New York State Traffic and Transit service, does not work, nor do 611, 711, or 811. I’ll assume any phone with dial tone can reach 911 but I don’t make non-essential 911 calls.
A lot of observers do not seem to realize that CityBridge, the consortium of media, advertising and technology companies granted a monopoly franchise for its LinkNYC kiosks, also owns all of New York’s remaining outdoor public pay telephones. The consortium basically confiscated them from about a dozen or so independent payphone service providers in 2016. At present there are about 3200 remaining payphones on City sidewalks, almost double the quantity of their LinkNYC replacements.
CityBridge’s task of replacing the old payphones with LinkNYC, the so-called “payphone of the future”, is made simpler for not having to coördinate with the former owners of those phones. Since mid-2018, however, the trend appears to have shifted from replacing payphones with LinkNYC kiosks to simply removing the phones and leaving nothing but sidewalk behind. The pace of new installations and activations also seemed to have come to almost a complete halt since the summer of 2018, when the original LinkNYC manufacturing plant was demolished.
In some instances the removal of a payphone was followed by laying the foundation for a replacement LinkNYC kiosk, but the kiosk was never actually installed. To prevent anyone from meddling with the innards of the kiosk’s foundation a large, homely, orange pylon made of rotting plywood is placed over the spot. I have spotted 9 or 10 of these eyesores, so there must be a lot more than that littering the five boroughs. This one, at 30-30 Thomson Avenue, has been in place long enough to have been immortalized on Google’s Street View. According to Street View’s image capture date this pylon has been out there moldering away since at least July, 2018.
Another symptom of LinkNYC’s stagnated rollout is the quantity of payphone enclosures which have had their payphones removed but the enclosure remains. These structures serve no purpose whatsoever except to display advertising panel on the side surfaces. I would not know how many of these abandoned enclosures exist, and I recognize that my interest in such things might make it seem like they are more numerous than they really are. But the quantity is disheartening, and begs the obvious question of why payphone enclosures with fully functional phones inside are removed but useless structures like this are not.
If you need even more evidence of LinkNYC not living up to its ambitious goals of having 10,000 of these kiosks every 50 feet for as far as the eye can bleed you can also keep an eye out for 6-digit numbers and a ¢ sign scrawled on sidewalks around town. These numbers are identifiers for LinkNYC kiosks that were expected to be installed but, so far at least, never were. This number, showing its age for having faded, has been on this spot for about 2 years, and illustrates how kiosks were expected to go up on spots where no payphones ever existed. You will also see these numbers painted at the base of existing payphone enclosures, serving as a kind of code that the payphone’s angel of death will swoop in eventually. In the immediate vicinity of this location I spotted 6 or 7 other numbers painted on sidewalks.
