This is somewhat an unfounded theory of mine and I was hoping if anyone has any insight: but I sense that this is perhaps a construction of Western restoration/preservationist theory. A lot of effort seems to be taken to either preserve original material, not take liberties etc. While touring temples and museums in Japan, I got a sense that restorations were much more aggressive, and less regard was taken to the preservation of material (or building "fabric"), with a greater focus on the use of traditional techniques during restoration.
This is an article in desperate need for some data visualizations. I do not think it does an effective job of communicating differences in performance.
> To cut to the chase, I think local councils are really upset that Telstra has the right to put these anywhere they want.
Yes, as per the link I posted (which appears to predate your investigation by a number of years)
I personally think that there needs to be a middle ground - Telstra have the real estate they do for the express purpose of providing access to a public phone, and I have no objection to them adding some advertising onto those.
I do, however, find it difficult to agree to Telstra using that to justify building a much larger billboard that has little to no purpose relating to access to the public telephone network.
Melbourne does not have any advertising on its pay phones now (not that I can think of, but I am going out some time this afternoon and will double check the CBD)
A walk up King Street showed that there were ten public phones, 2 had large screens for advertising integrated into them, 3 had other advertising on them, and the remainder had no advertising at all.
King Street isn't a main thoroughfare, just the one I happened to walk up
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