I see them all over the place. I Googled N.O. switch and found it probably means Normally Open. So what happens when it closes? Some, if not all, of the boxes have a green light on them.
Can you provide a picture of the box on the utility pole?
What’s on a Utility Pole?
http://www.psc.state.fl.us/consumers/utilitypole/en/default.aspx
NO and NC are designations that are usually used for relays. A NO relay means that the circuit is open (not connected) when no energy is applied to the relay. When the relay is energized, the circuit closes (connects).
So my guess is these are relays used for connecting various parts of the electrical distribution grid to substations and transformers. When the grid is operational, the relays close the connection. When the grid goes wonky, the relays lose power and open to protect downstream equipment.
Normally Open and Normally Closed are used for switches, too.
The NO contacts on a relay are open when no power is applied or the switch is not pressed , NC are closed when no power is applied, or the switch is not pressed.
All I know is that I’ve never seen these before a few weeks ago, and driving down a dark rural road I was completely blinded by some of the green status lights. I can’t see why they would need to be so bright or have their cone focused at the traffic.
I’ve seen traffic light controllers on poles, they are very large, 3’ x 2’ or so. Perhaps your city installed some new ones. Once I found the number, I called the traffic light department in Little Rock and actually spoke to a real, live person about a problem with the lights at an intersection.
Well, that’s an excellent suggestion, but these are many miles from the nearest traffic light. 
They’re power-related and fairly new. At a guess, they’re some kind of remote monitoring and microgrid switching equipment. Maybe none of the crews have driven past them at night, or something.
Depending on the State - I imagine it won’t be long before some of the locals use them for target practice.
At the distribution level of a neighborhood or town, the power grid is just like a scaled-up version of your home’s wiring. The substation, where transmission voltage (>50kV) is stepped down to the distribution voltage (4-35kV, usually), is like the breaker box in your home, with several feeder circuits coming out of it. When a short circuit occurs anywhere on a feeder circuit, the breaker at the substation trips open and the whole circuit goes dead. Each feeder circuit has switches spaced all down its length, so if, say a pole gets taken out by a car, or something else happens that will require a while to fix, the linemen can open up the nearest switch on each side of the fault, isolating it so the rest of the circuit, and customers fed from it, can be reenergized. Since the circuits are normally only connected at one end, closing the breaker at the substation reenergizes only the substation side of the isolated area. So, normally open switches, or feeder ties, are installed where two feeder lines come close together, and the far end of the faulted circuit can be reenergized from the other feeder circuit.
Traditionally, all of these switches are manual switches at the tops of the poles, operated by linemen with long insulated sticks. Many utilities, including the one I work at, are starting to install remote switching equipment on distribution lines, similar to what’s existed for decades on the higher-voltage lines. When a fault occurs, a computer at the substation analyzes data the feeder relay collected, determines where the fault occurred, and operates radio controlled switches to isolate the problem section of line automatically, and within a couple of minutes, compared to the hour or more it can take for a lineman to drive around, find the problem, and open and close the switches by hand. As for the bright green lights, green is the industry standard for an open switch, whereas red is a closed switch. I’d guess the power company intended for them to be visible to linemen driving by during the day, and never thought about what it would be like at night.
Thanks, Silophant. That is cool.