Do most residential neighboorhoods near you have underground electrical feeds? We have mainly overhead transmition, but newer developments that are owned by contracters versus the city are underground. I like underground better, but I still like overhead. Overhead is cool because you can see all the lines and it just looks more classic to me.

Here most are underground, believe it or not the rumour is this neighbourhood is the first place to ever have underground distribution! Anywhere in North America! All new areas have underground but there are a few older than this area (from the 50's) and the downtown area have overhead.

wow. The electric company still uses overhead, but they will do underground wiring if a contracter wishes. After hurricane Irene, there was talk amongst Rhode Islanders about switching to underground wiring instead of the "old and outdated" overhead technoledgy because no one can stand a couple days with no electricity. (as you probably know i'm the boy scouts so it was just another camping trip for me. ) A national grid spokesperson said that putting in brand new underground wiring and removing the old wiring would cost about $1 million per mile. so you know that will not happen.

Yeah it is expensive, that's one problem. Plus it costs more and takes longer to repair if anything does go wrong, I like seeing underground in residential areas but other than that I'm fine with overhead, it's even better with concrete poles!

My street is under ground but the lines on the next street (which also feeds mine) are overhead.

Yeah overhead lines are easier to work on and easier to string new lines from. Just bolt an insulator to the pole if it need one and off you go. Overhead wiring requires pole renewal (if wood is used) and is open for falling trees to hit them, but underground wiring is expensive and is vulnerable to be cut by excavation and/or road work.

It's entirely overhead in my area! Only the streetlights circuits are underground in some streets.

Some older underground wiring here used wood poles and the streetlight wires ran up the side of the pole in metal U shaped cunduit. Roger Williams Park/Zoo in Providence, RI still has that in use today, using 250w M-250R2s on 6 ft cantelever brackets. replacement poles are black anchor base aluminum poles with 6 ft tapered E arms and 250w HPS M-250R2s.

They did that here when they replaced some aluminium poles with wood utility poles.

Note that the M-400R2 is actually fed from the existing underground streetlighting circuit.

That was done around here too, (see here). Sadly all of those Powerlites got replaced by OVHs recently.

Why do that? if they wanted FCO just change out the refractor on the R47s since I believe the Powerlites used the same reflector for drop lens and FCO.

That would be nice but it seems the city of Brampton like to replace everything.

Same goes for the Town of Markham in the past year, it looks like the only lumes they save are the ones on utility poles.