How Cell Phones Led To The Decline Of Pay Phones In NJ

It has to be a no, right? The correct answer has to be no; there is not even one remaining working pay phone in the state of New Jersey.

When did America have the most? 1995. In that year, there were 2,600,000 pay phones on our streets and in our buildings.

Then came cell phones. In 2001, seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, BellSouth was the first phone company to announce it was getting out of the payphone business.

In 2007 AT&T did the same, followed by Verizon in 2011.

Where are the payphones in New Jersey?

By 2018, there were so few pay phones left across the United States that the FCC decided to no longer bother auditing them to know how many were left. As a result, we can only assume.

And while I realize there still may be an old, broken-down pay phone on some occasional street corner that simply was never taken down, I have to assume there is not a single remaining pay phone left anywhere in New Jersey that works. Would any company still be servicing it? Doubtful.

The last FCC audit was done in 2016. That’s the final time they were counted, and that’s going on nearly a decade. Even nine years ago, New Jersey had only 3,517 left. 16 years prior, in 2000, we had 95,781.

So what are the odds anyone could win the challenge of finding a New Jersey public pay phone with a dial tone, and still be working to make a call?

I wrote about this more than a year ago.
Read More: Just how fast have pay phones gone away in NJ?

I shared the story of my kids, 5 and 7 at the time, being in Union County Park and seeing a curious-looking relic on a walk near the restrooms. It was a pay phone, and even then in 2012 it was becoming an oddity. Out of curiosity, I picked up the receiver just to confirm it was long dead, and to my surprise, there actually was a dial tone.

My kids wanted to listen, and I realized then that being born after cell phones and growing up in a landline-free home, they had never heard a dial tone before. Talk about feeling like a relic yourself!

You want to see how fast pay phones went away from the New Jersey landscape? Keep reading, and scroll through this list of states below to see where we rank in how fast ours vanished.

And in the meantime, if you can find a single working pay phone in the state of New Jersey, I’d love you to prove it. You can always send videos through the free NJ101.5 app.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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