Just a little irony exists in this shot of two working payphones reflected in the screen of a non-working LinkNYC tablet. New York’s outdoor payphones are owned by CityBridge, the same company charged with a sort of corporate cannibalism in replacing them with LinkNYC kiosks. In the future this reflection might be that of another LinkNYC kiosk, even if those payphones appear to be less than 50 feet away from the LinkNYC kiosk. Siting requirements dictate that no two LinkNYC kiosks can be closer than 50 feet apart.

Payphones Reflected in a LinkNYC Nonworking Tablet Screen

I must concede that the working status of these kiosks’ tablet screens seems to have improved in the past year or so. I don’t base this assessment on the so-called “real time” data provided by CityBridge, which I find puzzling in its vagaries. I dumped that data into a map, which provides limited usefulness at this point. I’ve seen reports in this data of kiosk tablets near me not working for 48 hours. But any time I passed the device during that time frame the screens were on and the tablet worked fine. Conversely, tablets I’ve known to be down for days at a time never appeared in the dataset, which is updated hourly.

Still, the kiosk status dataset seems to possess some connection to reality. During the polar vortex cold snap a few weeks ago the data seemed to reveal that LinkNYC’s tablets can’t handle the cold as well as other parts of the kiosk. According to data released by CityBridge as many as 241 tablets (among 1760 activated LinkNYC kiosks) were not working. That’s about 13.7% of the machines reporting no tablet functionality, by far the highest number I’ve seen since I started parsing the LinkNYC Status data. Typically the number of tablets reported down is between 15 and 20.

Still, the data continue to confuse and confound not just on accuracy but on fundamental relevance. It also makes me ask why tablets are left turned on in the first place when real-feel temperature was -20°. It’s like an invitation to hypothermia, since you cannot use the tablets while wearing gloves.

Another annoyance is when emergency alert announcements appear on the advertising panel, but disappear before you have a chance to read it. Whoever expects to get emergency alerts from LinkNYC kiosks cannot regard it as a legitimately useful platform. Like the endless barrage of increasingly insipid platitudes the cycle through the ad screens as filler I think the emergency alerts are just some Smart City frosting on a stale cake.

Here are a couple more photos of reflections from non-working LinkNYC tablets. The first one looks kinda like my ex-girlfriend.

Woman’s Reflection in the Tablet Screen of a Non-Working LinkNYC Kiosk