You don’t see phone booths much anymore. Any reason other than economics–that it’s cheaper just to hang a phone than to build an enclosure around it?
Dingdingding!!
Mobile phones.
That’s f*cking mobile phones, coldfire. But I think Mjollnir is asking why those public 'phones which still exist are in small shields rather than fully enclosed. My WAG would be that the quality of both the lines and the microphones have improved, meaning that you can use the 'phone well enough without having to be fully enclosed. Many mikes now are highly directional and compressed, meaning less spill into the receiver from background noise.
picmr
Cost is the most obvious answer, but I think there might have been security issues as well. Like getting in a booth, even if you don’t close the door, along comes a mugger and you have no way out.
[hijack]
Hilarious scene in the first (1978) Christopher Reeve “Superman”. Lois Lane is hanging out a helicopter, Clark Kent is walking down the sidewalk and realizes what is happening, decides he has to change to Supes for the very frist time, spots a phone “booth”, stares at it for an entire second and concludes that it is not really a booth at all, oldest 20% of the audience cracks up laughing, youngest 80% can’t figure out the joke, and Clark Kent uses the revolving doors of the office building to change clothes.
I think it’s a matter of cleanliness. Most full booths I’ve ever seen were graffiti-covered and had various amount of litter in them, as well as broken panes of glass/pseudo-glass. Also, in big cities, they’re a potential “house” for homeless people. I know I’ve avoided making a needed phone call in DC just because the phone booth reeked of urine.
Paying for phone cleaners isn’t a big expense for phone companies, so making public phones less likely to need cleaning is the next best solution.
It’s a global conspiracy against Superman.
Most of the public phones around here (North-west Ohio) are usable from inside your car. They have a long cord on the receiver so you can call from the comfort of your automobile, thus eliminating the need for a full booth. (Provided your left arm is 5 ft. long. The keypad is still on the phone itself, rather than the receiver. I never understood that.)
I think it’s also due to the fact that booths weren’t generally wheelchair accessible. It was quite a tight fit to get a wheelchair in one of those, if possible at all and the phones were placed up much higher than in a “booth-less” set up.
The security and cleanliness concerns cited above are legitimate, but there’s no reason phones inside public
building, airports, and so on couldn’t still be in booths,
other than that it’s cheaper for them not to be.
My old school (UCLA) still actually has a few booths tucked
away in older buildings. I know one where the booth seems
to be recessed into the corridor wall; in the old student
center building there are two old, very large booths with
writing tables. In all these, when you go inside and shut
the door, the light comes on.
Many public phone booths were pulled because they attracted crime. I know Los Angeles had a big move to pull pay phones in areas that they claimed were used for drug sales. There was one row of phone booths in a strip mall near my house, I actually tried to use the phone once and was pushed aside by some very agressive guys. I later learned that this row of phones was used by phone card scammers. They’d sell you a free call to Mexico or Columbia for $20, and you could talk as long as you like. The phones were never accessible to the public, only to people buying illegal phone credit card calls.
And the phone booths that remain are even worse. I was walking near my neighborhood in San Francisco on Haight St. when I saw a fight going on, not an unusual occurrence in that neighborhood, but these people were trying to kill each other, so I went to the nearby phone booth to call 911. The call would not go through. I dialed the operator, it turned out the phone booth was a privately owned phone, they refused to connect 800 numbers or 911 calls. I guess there is no profit in connecting free calls, so they eliminated them. Isn’t that illegal?
oh oops, I should have read more closely, of course the question isn’t about the lack of public phones, but of enclosed booths. I don’t know the reason why, but of course it seems like booths are more expensive than those kiosks they hang on a wall.
The simple and actual reason has been stated. Booths are difficult to maintain. Homeless people used them for toliets and they made it easy to promote crime.
The ADA was passed long after phone booths died. I doubt this played any factor in their death though it would today
“there’s no reason phones inside public building, airports, and so on couldn’t still be in booths, other than that it’s cheaper for them not to be.”
There are still plenty of phone booths in the Daley Center (civil courthouse) in downtown Chicago. This is because:
- they are built into the wall. They aren’t glass booths with a folding door but walled booths with a single glass door;
- the judges don’t want too much noise from the corridors filtering into the courtrooms; and
- a lot of calls made from a courthouse are NOT meant to be heard by ears other than the parties to the phone call.
On the last point - privacy - the phone booths are often used by attorneys and others to make or receive cellphone calls.
It is definitely a factor today. In my town, the city fathers have spent a huge amount of money on fixing up the downtown pedestrian mall area, including $200,000 on 4 “kiosks” that have newspaper vending racks and pay phones, they’re six feet square and about 15 feet tall. These were designed to replace some inexpensive wood kiosks that served the same function, but they didn’t like people tacking a kazillion posters to it (even though that was what the wood kiosks were intended for). So the new kiosks were metal.
Unfortunately, someone was not paying attention, and none of the new kiosks’ pay phones were handicapped accessible, they were about 8 inches higher than ADA regulations allowed. So they dug a hole 8 inches deep to sit these kiosks in. Now they’re ADA approved.
I am inevitably reminded of a Monty Python sketch. An actress is 6 inches taller than the actor she plays opposite. The director complains about the extreme height difference of 2 1/2 feet. She says, “but it’s in my contract! I always act while standing on a 2 foot box! Its my trademark!” So they have to dig a 2 1/2 foot trench for the actress (and her boxes) to stand in.