By the bye, in my (definitely middle-class) neighborhood of ca 5 km diameter, incorporating 3 commercial centers, I know of at least 10 outdoor public telephones, all of which are functional, even at -40° C/F.
There is a large neighborhood of apartment complexes a couple of miles east of my definitely middle class neighborhood and a substantial number of those have
subsidized units. There are several "convenience stores" in that neighborhood and most of those have phone booths somewhere on the premises. Notice I specified "phone booths" and not phones. The booths may be but there haven't been any phones in the booths for over a decade to my personal knowledge. The telephone company removed the phones because maintenance costs far exceeded any income. For a while some convenience store managers subsidized the actual phones as a customer service, but they gave that up when they realized the phones were going unused and were not drawing customers.
The store owners would like to have the booths removed, but they are the property of the telephone company and the telco has taken the position that it isn't worth the cost to remove them unless the store owners will pay them to do so. Catch-22 📞. On the other hand I thought I saw a blue British Police box the other day with flashing red light on its roof, but I must have been seeing things because it seemed to sort of faded out with a strange swooshing sound.
(All these new emojis in MacOS 10.12.2 beta and still no dope-slap, not even a Tardis 😡)
