If you live in a big city, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of rushing to the subway only to realize—eventually—that it’s delayed and you would have been better off walking or taking the bus. What if there were digital screens mounted on street corners that warned you the subway was running late and directed you to other forms of transportation? And what if those screens also notified you of community events, listed daily pollution levels, and solicited your opinion on local government initiatives?

Such a scenario may soon be reality in London and New York. Both cities are replacing outdated phone booths with Wi-Fi kiosks that have embedded computing tablets, USB charging ports, keypads for making phone calls, and large screens that display relevant information to passersby. New York, which started installing its “LinkNYC” kiosks in 2016, currently has more than 900 activated across all five boroughs and plans to increase that number to 7,500. The U.K. just started erecting its “InLinkUK” kiosks in London and intends to deploy up to 1,000 across the country.

Today, people use the Links primarily to charge their smartphones, take advantage of the fast Wi-Fi, make Internet (VoIP) calls, and search for information about the weather and local restaurants. All these services are free to use, in part because the 10-foot-tall kiosks display ads that generate funds the cities share with the companies that designed and run the technology. These companies, which include Qualcomm and the telecom giant BT, pay for the Links’ installation and maintenance costs. They have estimated that the city of New York will earn more than half a billion dollars in revenue over 12 years from the LinkNYC partnership.

A LinkNYC Wi-Fi kiosk on the street. Intersection runs more than 900 of these across New York City.

Link is poised to be far more than an advertising and Wi-Fi network, however. Intersection, the company that manages the Link projects in London and New York, is considering upgrading them to support everything from augmented reality to autonomous vehicles. “Phase One was about making sure we’re offering robust services to people,” says Intersection’s chief innovation officer, Colin O’Donnell. “Now we’re figuring out how we can leverage all the different data sets we have access to and make [this technology] as dynamic and responsive as it can be.”

Intersection’s ambitions bear attention because it is one of the few private firms that large cities have partnered with on high-profile public-information projects—and its digital technology is likely to spread to other major U.S. cities, such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle, where it holds multiyear municipal and transit advertising contracts. (That’s true despite public concern last year that some people were using the LinkNYC kiosks to watch inappropriate videos and blast music. Intersection says it disabled the Internet browser on the kiosks’ tablets in September 2016 and has received very few complaints since.)