NYC Wants To Reinvent The Pay Phone

There are only 11,000 payphones left scattered across the five boroughs and New York City has launched a contest for their reinvention.

We know that with the rise of mobile phones and digital media, the way that New Yorkers share information is changing rapidly. In order to modernize our powerful communications infrastructure, the City of New York is hosting Reinvent Payphones, a public design challenge that seeks to rally urban designers, planners, technologists and policy experts to create physical and/or virtual prototypes that imagine the future of payphones.

The timing of the contest is interesting, considering that New Yorkers lined up for hours to use them during the widespread blackout that followed Hurricane Sandy. (Via Gothamist)