Photo by Matt**.

Be honest: has anyone reading this used a pay phone at a Metro station — or anywhere for that matter — in the last couple of years? I’m willing to wager there aren’t many of you who are nodding your heads. That said, it’s hardly shocking when Kytja Weir reports this morning that pay phones inside Metro stations will likely soon go the way of the eight-track, the VCR and the cassette Walkman, floating off into the ether of technological Valhalla.

According to Weir, Metro’s ten-year contract with Verizon to supply and maintain the public pay phones expires early next year, and Verizon hasn’t shown any interest in revisiting that arrangement. (We can’t imagine that, at a cost of a million dollars per year, the arrangement isn’t a very profitable one for the telecom.) Factor in WMATA’s (oft-delayed) plan to provide cell phone reception in the tubes, and one can see why Metro will have difficulty finding someone who will pay them to host pay phones, which are nearly on the brink of extinction nationwide. Some may argue that pay phones could serve a valuable purpose in the event of an emergency in a Metro station not wired for cell service — though that sounds like a role that emergency phones maintained by Metro or its police force should probably be filling.