Stumbled on a blog that tracks the number of active payphones left in each state

I was looking up something about old phone booths and fell into a rabbit hole. Ended up on this blog called 'Payphone Project' run by some guy who's been logging them for over a decade. The stat that got me was that as of last month, there are only 17 working payphones left in the entire state of Oregon. I'm in Albuquerque and I can't even remember the last time I saw one. The blog is just lists, photos, and notes from his trips. No ads, no fancy design, just a guy and his weird hobby. It's the kind of specific, useless info I love. Anyone else find blogs that are basically just one person's hyper-focused data dump?

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1 Comment

ryanreed2h ago

Gotta wonder what the endgame is for a hobby like that. Like, is he waiting for the number to hit zero so he can finally retire? I love a good weird data set too, but tracking payphones feels like keeping a death count for a technology that already flatlined years ago. The charm is in the pointlessness, I guess.