More expensive to build. That doesn’t get offset by accidents and whatever. Also harder to repair in case something really is broken with it.
Here they are for residential supply. It’s been this way for almost 50 years.
For high voltage AC, underground calling is actually a nightmare from a maintenance perspective.
Don’t know why they don’t this in your place. Here, power, phone, fiber, everything is underground for years now.
Very very expensive. For fiber, though, it’s starting to make sense economically.
Some unprepared countries tried this, in an effort to modernize. Without interdeparrment communication, good documentation, coordination, signage and, well, maps that included depth data that are maintained and updated in real time, yould have frequent outages each time one works department or private contractor did some digging in an inocuous patch.
Source: am malaysian.
$$$
In the city i live in (Victoria, BC) the wealthiest part of town has buried lines. Everywhere else, they’re on poles.
There’s 3 answers.
- It’s shitty to maintain underground wiring and it’s shitty to trench it in the first place, so while you are saving money in the long run, you’re paying upfront to run it and your routine maintenance costs are higher in short bursts instead of lower cost per issue, but a lot more issues. This makes people angry the money line didn’t go up enough that month and now you’re fired… even though you saved them money in the long run.
- You can’t run it very far underground. I won’t get into the physics, but suffice it to say, running power underground tends to be “leaky”, and it will bleed away very quickly over relatively short distances.
- Sunk Costs. Tech for trenching and boring has gotten a lot better, it costs less to do than it did 100 years ago, but moving the lines now and tearing down the old ones would cost money upfront and no one wants to pay for that.
The poors get overhead lines, the wealthy get underground
Why weren’t telephone lines and electrical lines not buried under ground?
I guess Dickle has no time for proofreading because need to post 10 times a day
This is just a guess, but I think it might be because not everyone needed or had a phone at first.
They only connected a few important buildings at first, and then started tying in more. If they had started underground, they’d have to dig up the streets every time someone bought their first telephone.
That’s exactly what’s happening where I am. Wildfire danger is so high they have to shut down city power every time there’s serious wind, as there aren’t enough fire services to cover all the potential fires from downed lines. Now a good chunk of tax dollars are going to moving lines underground, though arguably it’ll take some time.
Cause it’s always tempting doing the short sighted solution since the cost seems very low given how quickly you get the benefit.
But once you get the benefit, the cost can keep growing even though you’ve already experienced the political high from bringing new infrastructure.
It’s like the sunken cost fallacy, once you accepted the short sighted solution was a good deal, you kind of set yourself up to keep thinking it’s still worth it even though the formula gets worse as time goes on.
Before hydraulics digging was hard AF. And it’s still cheaper to put them on poles.
In Australia our power lines are mostly aerial, but telephone/broadband lines are mostly underground.
