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LONDON – The British phone booth is not dead yet. In parts of central London, a box is placed every 100 feet, and if the telephone companies succeed, they will plant one every 50 feet.
But it is not the red cast iron booths that have been for generations emblems of Britain. According to critics, these are horrors, covered with digital advertising screens and likely to be transformed into surveillance stations.
Even worse, some are imported from New York.
The result is a battle on the British public space, led by local town planners and telecommunications companies. The most controversial battle takes place in Westminster, in the heart of London, where new telephone kiosks are set up between construction barriers and bus stops in crowded streets.
The classic red cabins, with domed roofs and molded royal crowns, have been rendered obsolete by the rise of cell phones. Yet, the telephone companies have never given up their rights on the sidewalk. Under British rules in force since the iPhone was created, payphones are still considered vital infrastructure and companies with appropriate licenses can continue to use them as long as local boards do not oppose.
For example, the telephone companies set up a new type of stand: two-sided digital screens with Internet connectivity and touch-screen cards that display craft beer and credit card ads.
"Many of them are announcing totems with a handset," said John Walker, planning director for Westminster City Council. "They are just a blot on the landscape."
According to an association of councils of England and Wales, some boards are flooded with phone booth proposals 900% higher than a few years ago. The companies have submitted proposals for 300 new booths in the past two years at Westminster only, where the boxes are already located between six and one block away on a busy portion of Edgware Road.
The councils are lobbying the central government to change the law.
Critics call the profusion of high-tech advertising-centric stands – kiosks in the new language of the telephone companies – a bigger sale of British public space. Telephone booths moved from the public sector to the private sector in the 1980s when British Telecom was privatized under the direction of Margaret Thatcher and her monopoly on the booths ended.
Some proposals at Westminster relate to traditional stands with a wall for advertising. Others, like New York's InLink kiosks, are stylish Internet-connected stations with touch-sensitive cards and electronic billboards flashing on passers-by, privacy advocates say. They are a collaboration between BT, the descendant of British Telecom; Intersection, an enterprise of smart cities with links to Google's parent company, Alphabet; and a giant of outdoor advertising.
The planning documents indicate that InLink kiosks are supposed to be able to "anonymously monitor" things like "pedestrian movement," raising concerns that they can follow anyone whose phone goes through Wi-Fi range. The kiosks are also equipped with cameras, but BT says they have not been turned on yet.
"The infrastructure needed to build a surveillance network is being installed on British streets," said Adrian Short, Data Analyst Web portal to track InLink applications. "And the councils do not have or have the right to refuse them."
The new boxes would join or, in some cases, replace a mishmash of phone booths dating back to the 1990s and already dirty on the street.
And since each of the 33 local authorities in London deals with planning separately, it is up to local planning teams to scrutinize the phone booth proposals.
Mr. Walker said that they arrived at his Westminster office in dozens of paper packages, sometimes just before the Christmas holidays. The countdown begins then: 56 days until, in the absence of board objection, the telephone company has the right to start work.
Establishing credible objections is a laborious process, requiring planners to solicit feedback from nearby businesses and traffic specialists. The phone companies often promise to remove two new boxes, but Walker said Westminster does not want it, period.
Matthew Carmona, professor of planning and urban planning at University College London, said the situation "has, in a way, surprised policy makers." After removing the phone booths obsolete with the rise of cell phones, the telephone companies realized that they could draw money from it in a different way, which allowed them to circumvent any regulation. "
The distribution of telephone booths also revealed the disadvantages of the fragmented London planning system. Accommodation for the visually impaired, for example, differ in each of London's boroughs.
Sarah Gaventa, a former design advisor to the UK government, said that a public art project she was working on required dozens of applications from seven different local authorities, a barrier that she said was n & # 39; It did not exist in other major European cities.
New York City, facing a corner corner of disused payphones, took a different transfer. He solicited proposals for a personalized telephone booth, and Problems have arisen with kiosks connected to the Internet. The city is now expected to earn half a billion dollars over 12 years thanks to the reduction of its advertising revenues.
London, by contrast, has been left largely under the scrutiny of rival companies in search of space in the streets.
By replacing the old booths with Internet-connected kiosks, the phone companies claim that they are decluttering the streets and giving Britons and tourists modern tools to navigate the city, resulting in more calls and more. Frequent use of touch screens. Neil Scoresby, General Manager of Payphones and InLink at BT, said that the company had complied with the planning laws and had sometimes agreed to remove a box that a board did not want.
According to InLink, the company only stores unique identifiers for users' phones after registering for the service and does not currently track pedestrian movements.
Westminster City Council has rejected approximately 175 requests for additional or replacement booths in the last two years. But the telephone companies can call on a government planning inspector to install them anyway.
Now the Westminster council is looking for broader powers. In August, he filed a complaint with the High Court of Justice to compel the planning inspector to consider, beyond the site and appearance of new boxes, whether it was necessary to use them. .
Walker said the Westminster council had a better idea of what to add when old phone booths were removed: "We would rather have a tree," he said.
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