Why aren’t the utilities all buried as they are in most of Europe? These arthritic poles are an eyesore. Can anyone tell me why other countries have succeeded in eliminating most of them?
The quick answers are that burying power lines is far more expensive than stringing wire. Although they usually are less susceptible to damage, they cost far more and take longer to repair when damage occurs, which can happen in many ways. The U.S. is physically gigantic compared to most other countries and communities are more spread out, increasing costs exponentially as you get to outlying areas. Power systems are local rather than national and so can’t compel entire areas to mandate underground lines.
Even so, most new developments today are using underground lines, since it’s not all that expensive to dig the lines while laying everything out from the ground up, and developments cover small, continguous areas.
It’s retrofitting all the existing lines that is economically impossible. Estimates I’ve seen have been in the trillions of dollars. For a fraction of that money we can start working on real issues, like failing bridges, water systems, flood protection and the like.
Here’s a couple of earlier threads that provides additional information. Will Power Lines Disappear? and Cost differential of hung vs. buried power lines.
Thanks. How did the Europeans do it so effectively? The old villages in Germany and France seem like they have never seen a utility pole, although they must have.
Just a WAG, but I’d bet that the combination of centralized utilities planning and massive rebuilding post-WWII had something to do with this.
The rural co-op I had buried all the cables, and only put up poles when a customer decided that the mile long drive was to expensive to pay for underground. The cables all started to fail after only a third of the estimated life was done. The area built up during that time and the cables were at the peak load too. They spent a few years replacing the underground cables at the higher expense. Unfortunately other electric distribution companies had the go ahead to connect sections with new lines, and weren’t required to also bury the lines. After they put up their poles running close to the buried lines, there was little reason for my co-op to have paid more to bury their lines.
Just a wild idea along the spirit of the OP: Has Tesla’s ideas for RF-transmitted energy ever been tested on a small community? (Or, is this how Tesla caused a brown out in CO, IIRC?)
Tesla’s ideas don’t work in a small laboratory.* There’s no chance they’d ever work in a real world situation.
*Somebody is now going to post that radiated power over seven feet has been demonstrated in a laboratory without understanding that the method used bore no relation to Tesla’s.
Just to offer a counterpoint, I’ve spent hours upon hours photoshopping all of the damned overhead electrical cables from my otherwise beautiful photography in the city of Ghent, Belgium. Granted these are for the trolley system to operate, but what an ugly nightmare!
Not picking on you Balthisar, but why do people think they’re ugly? Or, uglier than anything else in the city? I’ve always wondered about that.
The cable system, right? You know I’m not calling the trolleys ugly. In fact, I think they’re rather sleek and modern looking compared to a lot of the other local public transit that I’ve seen in the world. Ah, so the cables, well, maybe they’re not ugly per se, but when trying to capture ancient European buildings in photographs, there’s something unsettling about having cables show up in every, single ground-level photo I took.
When not talking about taking photos, they’re still omnipresent. The detract from the atmosphere. They’re not pretty, appealing, or otherwise something to make you say, “Wow! Look at these neat power cables!”
On the other hand, I had been wondering how the power is delivered to the trolleys. Seems that if there’s contact, friction would pretty soon destroy the contacts, and if there’s no contact or very loose contact, then arc damage would destroy them. Are there contact pads that are just a normal piece of maintenance or something?
We still have lots of overhead power lines in SoCal. About 20 years ago, a bunch of municipalities decided it was too expensive to drive them underground. At that time, I think it was going to cost $1 million per pole, roughly. I imagine that has gone up a bit…
They are ugly as hell and they make me nervous.
Weather is a large concern. New Hampshire has buried power lines, but Arkansas does not due to the cost. Snow removal here consists of two guys with shovels and a dump truck full of sand. It just isn’t worth it for the two days a year it snows. 
Yes, I did. A lot of people don’t like cables and wires (see EJsGirl’s post below yours). I dunno, they just don’t bother me like they do other people, I guess.
When you bury them, it isn’t just the expense of that. It also makes any kind of digging more expensive, because you’ve got to watch out for the underground power, so’s not to electrocute yourself. Other things like water and gas lines have to be in the ground, adding power crowds things.
Most power lines here in Australia are overhead too, and as we are nearly the same physical size as the US with 1/15 of the population, this would tend to support your argument.
Japanese cities have a lot of overhead power lines too, so I don’t think it’s about the size of the country or post-WWII rebuilding. I think some peoples just care more about the aesthetics of their cities than others.
Corrupt government is also part of the reason there are still many overhead lines on poles.
About 20 years ago, the big corporations got their friends in Congress to slip a provision into a bill (Telecommunications one, I think) that prohibited cities from charging private companies for municipal services like these.
So a lot of cities that had noticed the increase in cables (for increased electrical usage, and for telephone, cable TV, cellphones, computer networking, etc.), and the increasing congestion caused by frequently digging up streets to work on these, were looking at a system of underground tunnels to provide space for all of these, easily accessible and expandable. (Like the utility tunnels that exist in some of the older cities, like under New York City.)
But this bill made it illegal for cities to charge utilities rent for the use of such utility tunnels. So that made it financially impossible for cities to build such tunnels, and move these cables from overhead lines to underground. This pretty much brought such conversions to a halt.
So thank your bribeable representatives in Congress, and the corporations that bribed them for the continuing above-ground lines.
Isn’t it essentially a trade-off? I mean, forcing the power company to put all their lines underground will increase rates. Perhaps people will accept overhead lines before they will accept higher rates? Especially for us poor southern states. 
The right answer, folks will get undergound lines when ever they are willing to pay for it.
Up here in northern states like Minnesota, this is just an investment.
Underground lines eventually save the power company money, by eliminating downed lines from winter icing or other storms. (It probably takes decades for that investment to pay off, but the power company will be around that long, and ought to consider long-term plans like that.)
Even down south, aren’t there storms, tornadoes, windstorms with downed trees that knock down power lines? The emergency expense of fixing those would be eliminated with underground lines. Also, there is the cost of electricity – when power lines are down, customers are not buying electricity, and the company may be wasting electricity that it can’t sell.
Your argument makes it look like some grand conspiracy was underway. Quite possibly there was some backscratching involved but you overlooked the flip side of the situation.
The bill prevented the cities from forcing utilities to pay for underground construction which the utilities could neither tax nor adjust rates for. Utility rates are usually set for a region much larger than one city. Getting a special city rate to cover the cost of conversion was near impossible, so the utilities would be forced to either eat the cost of beautifying one city or try to spread that cost among their entire rate customer base.
So, without some kind of local surcharge for the conversion the city would reap the benefit of beautification at the expense of the utilities.
City governments still have an alternative which most have not utilized because they get scared when they actually have to commit their own money - They could simply not renew their franchises and form a municipal utility by providing a fair price acquisition of the utility. At that point they have full control over all facilities within their city limits (and full maintenance responsibility) From there they could build their own tunnels and hike their own rates to pay for the tunnels.
The real reason that underground facilities aren’t common everywhere is plain old cost. If you’re going to build new facilities you might as well build underground, but if you have old facilities that are above ground and work just fine your choices are to leave it alone or spend millions to tear down and replace a working system.