New York City has turned to Joe Q. Public for ideas on the payphone of the future, focusing (among other things) on the role of public telephones as public utilities for disaster planning and emergency situations.

Will the winning design of this contest be something as iconic as Brazil’s orelhão (“big ear”) payphone enclosure, or the U.K.’s red telephone box?

This is a great opportunity for artists to create a work of public art that could help define a city’s streetscape the way NYC’s yellow cabs do today.

I am someone who probably has the most avid and genuine interest in payphones of any adult person you will meet, but I am staying out of the Reinvent Payphone initiative. Most of my years as a payphone enthusiast have been met with ambivalence and ridicule, and I would not expect that to change now. I am also just not the personality type for these kind of events. Public hearings and community activism tend to turn into shouting matches where only the loud survive.

On the technical and functional side I imagine that proposals will come from people who do not use payphones and who are unfamiliar with the nuances of failure that inhabit today’s devices. (Who still uses payphones, anyway?)

Try to use any given payphone these days and you might encounter a variety of idiosyncrasies and disenfranchisements:

• Coin slots don’t work
• call quality tends to deteriorate over the course of phone calls
• phones take your money and complete a call but the person you call cannot hear you (this is true for 911 calls as well as paid calls)
• many toll-free services are unavailable from payphones
• keypad number stick or do not send tones expected by voicemail and touchtone-guided phone systems
• radio interference often intrudes upon telephone calls (why is it always Radio Disney?)

I see room for improvement and even opportunity for growth in public telephones, but I expect that responses to this call for ideas will focus on æsthetics and inoffensiveness at the expense of lowest-common-denominator functionality. Contributors’ inexperience with payphones might actually worsen core functionality of the devices by skimping on fundamentals of making telephone calls in favor of souped-up gadgetry.

Among other ideas I posted to this web site in September I believe that payphones should be free phones, with the costs of calls covered by display advertising or in-call commercial sponsorships. This is for simple economics: the costs of collecting money made by payphones is greater than the amount of money collected.

Once we stop thinking of these devices as “pay phones” and think of them instead as “public telephones” then their role in the 21st century becomes clearer. To use the city’s wording, the payphone of the future should be “a new public utility” and not so much a profit-center.

If the payment system must be maintained then the coin-insert mechanism should be dramatically improved. Certainly the city, with its army of coin-fed parking meters, knows a thing or two about this type of payment device.

There is no way to know but I would think that the payphone business today misses a relatively substantial amount of income simply on account of non-working coin-slot mechanisms.

Credit-card readers should be installed with fair-and-reasonable long distance rates clearly posted on the phones. This channel would make it easier for the more lucrative long-distance callers to use the phones and possibly make them profitable. Credit card payment is available today, with a small number of public telephones equipped with credit-card readers. But in most cases using credit and calling cards for long-distance calls at public telephones is laborious and error-prone.

The city could also go a long way toward subsidizing public telephones by taking the $10,000,000+ it spends annually on red emergency call boxes and replacing a portion of them with functional telephone devices usable by all.

The New York Public Library system should establish “Public Phone Rooms” or booths. If the San Francisco Public Library can maintain a public typewriter room then the public interest could be justified under the charter of any city’s public library system. Perhaps money for this could come from the Universal Service Fund.

Whatever the future of New York’s “Reinvent Payphones” initiative I expect to stand by as a bemused spectator. Among other causes for cynicism is my experience in January in trying to get the MTA to recognize that there is no Suicide Hotline Telephone on the RFK/Triborough Bridge. That encounter as well as other futile attempts at using 311 to report payphone-related issues left me unimpressed at how seriously the city takes such matters in everyday life.