Pay phones no biggie they are only at the rest stops anyway, but the 18,000 emergency phones located every so often on the road itself.... isn’t that part of the reason you pay the outrageous tolls to begin with? Yes most have cell phones, but if you are one of those 5% who don’t ... those emergency phones seem like worthy to keep for those 800 who needed them last year, especially considering how ridiculously expensive the PA Turnpike is.
I think the emergency phones will stay there. I still see them up in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and they’re probably needed because of the poor cell phone reception in the mountains.
I think I saw a study where they crunched the numbers on physical maintenance costs of all those emergency phones, and it just didn’t pay.
Tolls are outrageous because the State Legislature uses Turnpike Tolls to subsidize PennDOT.
The emergency phones along I-95 here in MA are long gone.
As a kid i’d kill the time by counting them as we drove by.