Last month, husband and wife photographer team Matt Salacuse and Stacey Pittman set out to document for Infrastructurist the last “Superman-style”–or, “accordion style” to the sticklers–phone booths remaining in Manhattan. A generation ago, these fixtures were a part of everyday life in NYC and the rest of America. Today, with the proliferation of cell phones, they are nearly extinct. But Salacuse and Pittman found 9 lovely specimens–and even stopped to make a few discrete phone calls along the way.
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Verizon promises that the outdoor booths will remain in service for the foreseeable future, but it’s never too late to stop by one and pretend it’s 1977.
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Click through below to see the full gallery.
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Specimen 1: 66th Street and West End Avenue
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Remember a few years ago when millions of our fellow Americans started gorging on bacon and cheeseburgers in order to lose weight? The Atkins diet fad was an odd moment in our culture and probably one best politely forgotten. But one reason the scheme took off like it did is that human beings are innately fascinated by counter-intuitive effects. Most examples you hear about on teevee–”Rock-hard abs without getting off your couch!”–are malarkey, of course. But in certain charmed cases, it is possible to get thin by eating lard, so to speak.
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One example is reducing traffic congestion by eliminating roads. Though our transportation planners still operate from the orthodoxy that the best way to untangle traffic is to build more roads, doing so actually proves counterproductive in some cases. There is even a mathematical theorem to explain why: “The Braess Paradox” (which sounds rather like a Robert Ludlum title) established that the addition of extra capacity to a road network often results in increased congestion and longer travel times. The reason has to do with the complex effects of individual drivers all trying to optimize their routes. The Braess paradox is not just an arcane bit of theory either – it plays frequently in real world situation.

Likewise, there is the phenomenon of induced demand – or the “if you build it, they will come” effect. In short, fancy new roads encourage people to drive more miles, as well as seeding new sprawl-style development that shifts new users onto them.

Of course, improving congestion is not the main reason why a city would want to knock down a poorly planned highway–the reasons for that are plentiful, and might include improving citizen health, restoring the local environment, and energizing the regional economy. More efficient traffic flow is just a wonderful side benefit.

Sound dubious? Here are several examples of how three cities (and their drivers) have fared better after highways that should never have been built in the first place were taken down.

CASE 1: Seoul, South Korea - Cheonggycheon highway

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