Metro is supposed to have at least one working pay phone in every rail station.
But the agency has not had any service provider for the pay phones since July, according to Metro, after negotiations with a company to take over from Verizon fell apart.
“It seems to be kind of up in the air at the moment,” Metro spokeswoman Carolina Lukas told The Washington Examiner.
That means if a phone breaks, no one is coming to fix it.
Riders without cell phones — or any rider in the 27 underground stations that don’t have full cell phone service — may be left disconnected when they need to let someone know they are running late due to a train breakdown, they’ve lost their own phone or need help.
The problem is that the market for payphones has dried up with the proliferation of cell phones. Verizon used to pay Metro $1 million per year to keep its phones in the system’s rail stations. But near the end of a 10-year contract that ended last year, the phone company told Metro that it was losing up to $500,000 a year on the little-used phones.
In January 2011, Metro’s board voted unanimously to maintain at least one payphone per station with TTY capability, meaning text telephones that can be used by those with hearing impairments, at a cost to the agency of about $100,000 per year.
Even though Metro had tight finances, board members said it was a crucial stopgap measure for riders to have a way of calling out at least until cell phone service could be established at all stations.
Currently cell phone service is supposed to be available on multiple networks throughout the underground system by October.
Lukas said Metro tried to find new bidders, but only one came forward. She said that deal subsequently fell apart. Now, Lukas said, the agency isn’t optimistic that any other providers will come forward.
So what is a rider to do?
Emergency call boxes are on the platform to reach Metro officials, Lukas said. Every station kiosk also has a phone, but it only connects to the central operations, not to an outside line.
During an emergency, she said, customers could ask a station manager to call operations, where a worker there could make an outside call on the riders’ behalf.
But it wasn’t exactly clear what constituted an emergency that would merit such phone use. Lukas said “any incident when a customer felt like they were in distress.”
