[LeifCarrotson]

I have what I believe to be a rational dislike for overhead wires for neighborhood electrical delivery: They're unreliable (multiple outages every winter because snowstorms take out trees), unsafe when they're knocked down but still live, expensive in the long run due to pole replacement and tree maintenance, ugly, and all it takes is a slight increase in capital expenses for installation to replace them with underground utilities. I don't think I'm alone in this.

[beerandt]

>expensive in the long run due to pole replacement and tree maintenance,

Not compared to burial. The cost is up front (not amortized) and is a big enough multiplier that it won't overcome maintenance costs, especially when including buried repair/maintenance costs, which are significantly higher than overhead, even taking into account the lower frequency. (Tree roots, dug-up lines, cathodic decay and leaking conduits, necessary relocations, etc, all happen.)

There's nothing preventing the adoption of buried electrical today except the customer's willingness to pay for it.

New neighborhoods and houses that want it, pay for it. Simple as that. And nothing prevents replacing existing overhead except it becomes a 100% unnecessary cost, once overhead has already been installed.

>...and all it takes is a slight increase in capital expenses for installation to replace them with underground

>slight

4-10x upfront install cost. Higher in urban environments. Not slight.

If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?

[cgriswald]

To compare fairly, you'd also have to take into account relative fire risk and difference in frequency of outages.

> If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?

I don't think he made such a claim. There's an implication that it's 'worth it', but not that it's necessarily less expensive to implement.

Companies aren't making irrational decisions. They just haven't historically been paying for the externalities.

[alamortsubite]

Not at all, but it's totally beside the parent's point, which is the hypocrisy of scapegoating overhead lines to restrict public transportation options, while simultaneously letting them proliferate unchallenged for residential electric delivery.

[oblio]

You're not alone. The EU generally has underground wires and where it doesn't yet have them it's actively planning to move them there.