In our town, up until last year on one of the busier streets there was one of the old free standing booths with the folding door. They tore it down when the property was redeveloped.
I always thought it was a nice little bit of nostalgia.
On topic, I do not carry a cell, and have noticed the decrease in pay phones. Gas stations seem to be the most likely place to find them.
Look like AT&T sees pay phones as losing proposition.
Payphones are still commonplace throughout Montreal – not as common as they once were, but you can still generally find one when you need it. Especially in metro stations – no cell reception (except in a few stations), so if you need to call someone and let them know you’re en route, very handy.
These are not just “legacy” equipment, either - they actually introduced new pay phones with alphabetic key pads that allow you to text someone. And local calls are a flat fee of $0.50 (recently increased from $0.25).
There are even booths.
BT in the UK want to remove 200 or so phonebooths in Scotland because they have not actually been used for a year. Of course, it’s hard to use a phone without a handset… 
In London, the only reason there are phonebooths is to keep the local transvestites business cards dry :dubious:
While Telecom in NZ may get a lot of business from payphones, many of these have moved into pubs, shops and dairies, and are not phonebooths.
Si
I’m surprised , in this day and age of cheap bandwidth, that public telephones aren’t plentiful, privately-run, and free (or close to free) to use. I’d have thought they’d be almost like free internet kiosks now: go to an Indian grocery / convenience store / petrol station / etc, pick up the handset, listen to a short advertisement, then place your call. And with a bit of luck, you’ll buy a Coke while you’re there.
Of course, that doesn’t take into account the future of the traditional public telephone box.
In Scotland a couple of the places they want to remove their phone or phones from completely include small to medium size towns - South Queensferry has around 9000 population and Bathgate has 15000. I don’t remember if there were other larger towns listed…
I don’t know haw many payphones there age now, but in August 2005 there were 6200 in Scotland and apparently over 2/3rds didn’t cover their costs…
(Dundee Telegraph)
I can’t find it now, but our local newspaper had an article on payphones in one of those weekend/human-interest sections a couple months back. The phone company spokesperson said they had removed many, and there were very few left in residential areas, but in more downtownish areas they had no immediate plans to remove any more. They are being used - both by people who choose for whatever reason not to have a cell phone, and by people who own cell phones but forgot them/had them stolen/use cash-card plans that they forgot to top up/suddenly discovered the battery was dead. Put those groups together and you have enough customers for the phones to continue to turn a modest but steady profit.
The major cost of operating public phones isn’t bandwidth, it’s maintenance. There appears to be a large segment of the population who think it’s fun to beat the hell out of them.
Yeah, that’s undoubtedly true in the case of your average phone on the street in a rough neighbourhood, but if it was more of a household-style phone inside a business such as a convenience store or bar under the watchful eye of the employees, surely vandalism and rough treatment wouldn’t be any more of a problem for the phone than it would be for the internet terminals you see around the place.
I never really thought about it, but since getting my cell phone, I’ve never really touched a payphone at all. If my battery was dead or I didn’t have it on me, I’d use one, but other than that…
Especially since the price raise from 25 cents up to 50. Thankfully I have a bunch of phone cards in my wallet if the need does arise.
Last time I used a payphone was in Yellowstone National Park this summer. I could not get a cell phone signal at all…that must be a common problem, because payphones were pretty common and easy to find there. Several right in Madison Campground, which is where I was staying.
Good thing I had a prepaid calling card, though, because all the quarters in the world wouldn’t let me call Minnesota. You cannot make a coin-paid interLATA (“long distance” outside of, in this case, YNP and about half the state of MT) call from these phones. You can call collect or charge the call to a third number, which is very expensive. (That’s where the “$22 shit” comes in.) Even the prepaid calling card gets many minutes chewed up by using it at a payphone…and the trick of having the operator dial the toll-free number no longer seems to work :(.
I think most phones, at least in Qwest country, have this problem, and it is very frustrating. I used to work for Qwest as a local toll operator once upon a time (2003-2005), and I know way too much about payphones. They really are a PITA. The breakup of Ma Bell really hurt the payphone–does the average person understand why I couldn’t use coins to call Minnesota from Wyoming? Does the average person know or care what a LATA is? No, they don’t. All they know is that they can’t make the call they want for a reasonable price and a cell phone would be so much easier and more convenient in the majority of cases (and cheaper, especially if you need to call often).
I have to say that, as an operator, I was not a always big fan. Too many pranking kids and angry, confused customers. Many malfunctions. Sometimes I would have to break in on a conversation to collect coins, which was awkward. It was kind of fun to listen as the coins dropped in and identify them by the sound, though. Qwest serves some pretty far-flung places, and some phones were so old that you had to warn the customer to put coins in after the party picked up, because, if there was no answer, there was no way to return the coins. Of course, since that meant it had to be an operator-assisted call, the rate was something ridiculous like $3.50 instead of 50 cents, which I think was pretty much bullshit. That turned a happy customer, somewhat bemused to find a phone where you need the operator in the 21st century, into a sour one real quick.
Perhaps a few will remain in remote areas like Yellowstone where cell coverage is poor…or perhaps someday they’ll block some natural beauty with a few ugly cell phone towers and even those phone booths will be gone forever.