Of course many countries are following the German lead ---- which they first started in 1870 — of Undergrounding; placing the cable in trenches rather than strung aloft.
I have mixed feelings about this.
The biggest problem with undergrounding is the additional expense of maintenance & fixing problems (and adding additional service). It’s usually 3-4 times as expensive as overhead wires.
It might be more acceptable in such a small country as Germany, but in the USA, with much more land area to cover, the cost is significant.
I’m not advocating it. Nor am I against it.
Of course weather cannot affect underground, and it may be safer but as I said earlier there’s an old romance to bare wooden poles out in the countryside, linking all folk.
If underneath, electric pulses are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed, as with the Persian couriers along the Royal Road, I imagine flooding on the present South Asian scale damages cable a bit
They’re stayed by groundwater, though. There’s a reason you don’t find many underground utilities in places like Florida.
Underground definitely has its place, but there are many times where it is not the right solution.
Former BellSouth tech. Yes, people still climb pokes, but most use ladders these days, at least in my experience. Bucket trucks are very expensive and only used by people such as cable repair where they’ll be up a pole for a long time.
Gaffing is still used, but it’s dangerous and the reason I’m a former tech. I cut out at 20’and have a bunch of rods and screws in my back because of it.
Yes it can!
In the northern part of the world, where you have a freeze-thaw cycle each year, that cycle will thrust rocks up through the soil, and they can disturb cables. (Growing up on a farm in Minnesota, every year or two we had to walk the fields with a stoneboat, and pick up new rocks that had ‘grown’ in our land during the spring thaw. And some of them were pretty big rocks. We sold the rocks to a guy who built stone fences & patios. Some years, the ‘crop’ of rocks was the most profitable crop on our farm!)
Also, some areas have earthquakes. I don’t know if that is considered ‘weather’, but it can certainly damage underground cables.
My brother works for a phone company, that has areas with many underground cables. They say that the damage to underground cables from ‘fools who don’t check before they dig’ is equal or worse than the damage to aboveground cables from ice buildup or falling branches. But the damage to underground cables is much more expensive to fix.
What is it with you Brits? 
I’m embarrassed to admit it : that site is much more interesting than it should be.
The utility lines in my neighborhood are underground. No poles. I like it.
And this is a problem, how? 
A coworker’s son got hired by the local Hydro company, and she mentioned he was learning to climb poles with spikes (mid-90’s). She also mentioned that he’d had one incident during training where he lost his “footing” and slid down the pole; and apparently some people quit because they have difficulty learning the technique (or bad experiences with sliding down the pole), but it was still required at the time. I gathered that the equipment presented enough friction that even a slide was not really too dangerous except for possible splinters - maybe a sprained ankle on touchdown.
Aus has used underground telephone cables for a very long time. Farms use poles. The old cables were unreliable when wet, but that hasn’t been a problem since the introduction of plastic insulation. There was also a problem with cable joins in the ??? 80’s ??? when the join device didn’t age well. (in contrast to soldered joints, which have lasted vry well indeed…)
My (90’s) suburb also has underground electricity. It’s fully insulated, so groundwater isn’t a problem (I live on top of a swamp: 1’ down it’s wet gravel).
Lets say you need the power turned off to your house at the pole. The tech will come to your house and using a very long, not conducting rod, will simply stand under the pole and reach up with the long rod and pull a switch from the ground.
Underground utilities are pretty common in middle class suburbs built in the 80’s or later.
Utility poles aren’t affected by the weather all that much either. Rain or snow heat or darkness do not effect them. Heavy icing can, lightning could, but that’s about it.
You know what doesn’t happen to the wires on the poles? People digging them up, or slicing them, when they are digging a new flowerbed or something. That was my most common repair, far more common than needing to replace a damaged above ground drop to the house. Underground splice kits are a pain, and probably expensive, and you are only allowed to have one splice between the tap and the house, so cutting the underground drop usually meant replacing it, which meant that you would have a cable going across your front yard for a week to a month until the contractor came out to bury it.
When you go up the pole, you throw your safety strap around the pole, that is what is providing you with friction. You are not actually just climbing the pole with all your weight on the spikes, you are leaning back a little and using the friction of the strap. If you fall, you are not going to fall away from the pole, and you will not fall all that fast, as you are still attached to your safety strap around the pole, so unless you are particularly unlucky, you will likely have little serious injury, but you are very likely to end up with quite a number of annoying minor injuries.
Well, underground utilities don’t get hit by cars or falling trees. Maybe overhead wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t done so hideously. Some countries, notably Denmark, which have what appears to be nearly 99% underground wires, do the few overhead installs they have meticulously. I wish we’d see more attention to detail like that in the US.
yeah, the training was to dig the boot spikes in hard enough and keep control of the angle of your soles, IIRC from a quick discussion. Otherwise, you slide down the pole. If it’s a long way down, that will result in “minor injuries” depending on the layers of protective clothing.
Most times when people talk about “burying utilities” this is done in a lot of new suburbs on the side streets (So much tidier); or in the more “downtown” areas for main services. Unless there’s a need for major rebuilds, the older house services stay where they are. (What are the odds that cable, phone and power all want to rewire at the same time?) I don’t know of a lot of burying services in rural runs. I did note the occasional places in my transcontinental travels that used concrete rather than preserved wood poles - presumably if distant from pole sources and because of the resultant expense.
In some of these countries, there may be only one electrical company, or one telephone company or one cable television company, or perhaps one company that manages two or three of these. In the US, there may be competing providers using the same utility poles, along with the municipality itself (say for streetlights or traffic signals) so things might not be as neat.
And in a dense place like Manhattan, virtually all utilities are underground, and have been since the late nineteenth century, when a storm took out many lines. Rather than taking the lead from Germany, Manhattan instead took the advice of Thomas Edison, who knew a thing or two about such matters.
Dunno, earlier this year the power was out for 24 hours because poles collapsed somewhere nearby, and I got £70 compensation. And a few months ago poles came down in a next-door neighbourhood, not affecting me, which is all that matters. Both cases it was just wind to blame, in otherwise normal weather ( c. 55F ).
The wind tugs more at the wires than at the poles.
Like most in Britain I live semi in the country. Even rural is overcrowded, so you get the twin disadvantages of country infrastructure with masses of people . It’s a small village, but there’s 2000 residents. I wish it was 20.
I am not sure what seems so aesthetically pleasing about those that is particularly different than those in the US. They are only power, there does not seem to be a phone or coaxial wire on them, so that may make them a bit more even looking.
There is also the downside of having transformers and stuff on the ground instead of being up on a pole, out of reach of children. Supposedly, the transformers (another downside of underground utilities, every 4 houses or so, someone needs to have a big green box in their yard) are locked, but the one in my front yard was easy to pry open and see a whole bunch of exposed wires inside. We were ids, but we weren’t stupid, and so no one ever was dumb enough to touch them, but it was a much greater potential danger than if you had to start by claiming the pole.
It is also easier for unscrupulous types to mess with the cable or phone system, whether that is an attempt to get free service, or simple vandalism. I’ve gone out on calls for cable being out, and when I got to the neighborhood, I found that all the lines had been removed or even cut from the ped. That was always a mess to sort out. Once at an apartment complex, someone had cut all the lines coming into the ped off at the ground. That took me and 4 other techs a full day to get sorted out, and that was only like a 16 unit apartment. The locks on those never worked right.
In Germany and other Nordic countries at least local authorities and utilities are supposed to co-ordinate their digging.
Sometimes we manage that here.
On the other hand Germans and Singaporeans tend to dig up their roads only at night, under arc lights.
As noted above, not all poles are accessible with a cherry picker.
They still climb and they compete too.
I remember reading an article about some turn-of-the-century New York City mayor who threatened to send city crews to chop down poles if the utilities did not start burying them. Apparently once he chopped a few to show he was serious, they started burying utilities.
Interesting Techdirt article just today on Louisville winning a court case over its right to set one-touch pole adjustments. For a new utility (say, Google Fiber) to run its cable, a number of other utilities may have to move theirs - but it has to be coordinated to maintain legal/code separation distances between power and communications. This could take months or years to get done. The city passed a law (as have many other municipalities) mandating that approved qualified contractors could do all moves at once. The local cable and phone companies of course opposed this in court, as real competition (horrors!!) might cut into their profits and customer base. heck, even better customer relations might be necessary, let alone service upgrades…