Why the de Blasio-era experiment was the wrong model and what we should do about it
Ten years ago, New York City began replacing its iconic relic of 20th-century communication, the neighborhood payphone, with what appeared to be a clever experiment in democratizing digital infrastructure: LinkNYC. Thousands of kiosks were to offer free phone calls, device charging and street-level Wi-Fi. At the time, it read as a civic win: clean up the streetscape, narrow the digital divide and let private advertising foot the bill.
A decade later, the record tells a different story. In 2021, the New York State Comptroller found that of 1,869 LinkNYC screens reviewed, only 137 stood in the Bronx, and that entire outer-borough ZIP codes had no kiosks at all: the exact inverse of the program's stated mission to narrow the digital divide. The same audit found CityBridge, the private consortium behind the program, was nearly $69 million behind on its revenue-sharing obligations to the City, and 76% of inspected kiosks had cleanliness or operational defects. LinkNYC was a flawed concept from its inception. And now its proposed evolution into 32-foot Link5G towers is not a correction; it is an escalation of the same mistake.
