Rough Couple of Weeks for CityBridge/LinkNYC

CityBridge cannot get a break these days. A couple of weeks ago it was Corey Johnson’s pronouncement that CityBridge did so poor a job of maintaining payphones in his district that he wanted them all removed.

Citing complaints that the payphones took up precious sidewalk space one must ask if Johnson thinks LinkNYC kiosks that will replace these phones are invisible.

He also cited “quality of life” issues with the payphones. Wait until he encounters LinkNYC, those notorious magnets for vagrants and squatters and other disruptive issues. LinkNYC will usher in a new range of quality of life issues to 9th Avenue that might make Johnson’s constituents want the payphones back.

Then last week came some pretty harsh comments about LinkNYC from Jessica Tisch, the newly-appointed head of DoITT, at a budget hearing on March 3. Tisch, who is shaping up to be CityBridge’s worst freakin’ nightmare, accused the consortium of failing to come anywhere near its financial targets and dragging its feet on new kiosk installations and activations. The hearing did not seem to have been attended by anyone from CityBridge.

Rumors have circulated recently that DoITT, the City agency that oversees the LinkNYC franchise, has considered pulling the plug on the program, or taking it over from CityBridge. I would not know how serious this threat is, but it looks like the days of DoITT’s seemingly lax oversight of CityBridge and its monopoly franchise have ended. The program should face far more scrutiny going forward.

I was interested to see who CityBridge might have sent to the hearing, and if they had a rebuttal for Tisch’s comments, which they had to have seen in advance. The former president of LinkNYC, who left the company some months ago, would have been most likely to fill that role. But she and others from the company who left recently have not been replaced nor has the role of LinkNYC’s president been incorporated into another position.

A spokesperson from CityBridge’s public relations firm issued a flat denial of Tisch’s comments, dismissing them as fiction, blaming DoITT and its byzantine municipal bureaucracy for creating one roadblock after another in getting kiosks installed and activated.

The LinkNYC franchise agreement clearly grants DoITT the right to terminate the contract, but does not specify what, exactly, would happen next if that occurred. It is hard to imagine a contingency in which CityBridge loses its franchise and the 1700+ kiosks presently active all come tumbling down.

Also circulating is word that all 3,200 remaining payphones on City property are on the chopping block, heading for quick and final removal. I have reason to doubt that the complete stable of payphones faces imminent removal, and that the process will more likely take a couple of years if not longer.

But with no definitive source for this I’ll just have to wait and see what happens. At the budget hearing Tisch mentioned that she had ordered the removal of “hundreds” of payphones, not all 3,200 of them, as reported and re-reported by one news outlet after another.

Ironically, as the bad news keeps coming for CityBridge, the consortium has begun displaying a series of “LinkNYC Impact” screens, showing statistics about what a positive force the kiosks have been in the community since the rollout began in early 2016.

One screen boasts of something like 8.7 million WiFi subscribers, a somewhat misleading stat implying the network has 8.7 million active users. That 8.7 million figure includes millions of travelers and tourists and locals like I who signed in to the WiFi once and never used it again. If this statistic continues accumulating like this we will eventually see that the networks has “billions and billions” of subscribers.

Who gains anything from knowing the LinkNYC screens have displayed announcements for thousands of Community Board meetings, or 1300+ “On This Day” blurbs?

The future of LinkNYC looks perilous, but one can maintain hope. I still wish well for this program, and maintain a probably futile hope that LinkNYC somehow becomes a better product. A telephone handset is probably asking too much, as is the ability for these kiosks to fully function during a widescale power outage.

But to fix simple things, like the kiosks’ erratic ability to connect to 711, or to access subway maps; or to give up on exasperatingly useless features like bus arrival time screens or anonymous “Thank You New Yorker” screens. It was a lovely idea but I bet nobody on the street had any idea what that was about.

Or perhaps some human intervention could prevent stranded, disembodied AP headlines like this one from throwing itself at our faces.