the top left anf bottom right pics show what RIDOT's poles use too except our poles are aluminum hapco poles. some are missing the covers while others have them. There are some poles that were never retrofitted to break-away though and are still standard anchor base. You can easily point them out because they're still standing lol.

I think MTO started using those around the mid 80s. The breakaway bases used before were cast aluminium but were the same height as the current bases.

We still have some non-breakway poles in use but they're behind a guard rail and the really old ones from the 50s have long since been removed around the early 80s or so.

yeah the 40s poles here that held Form 109s have been retrofitted to break-away but they left the ones behind the guardrail alone. the ones changed to breakaway are mostly truss and tapered elliptical poles now since the poles get hit all the time. for new RIDOT installations, all poles are breakaway regardless of whethere there's a guardrail present. the only exceptions are with jersey barriers and bridges. i think even lights poles mounted in islands have break away bases. For new NGrid metal pole installations, only poles on freeways are breakaway. any others such as in downtown areas or in upscale neighboorhoods with underground cables are not breakaway.

No breakaway bases here, all are either buried steel or concrete, or bolt on bases. Some of the high mast units have survived being in an impact with a road legal 22m long superlink with only a few bent reinforcement ribs or a little chipping on the concrete subbase, the rig having needed removal by cutting it off in pieces with a plasma torch. Cars just go flat. It is not good having a 30m pole fall across multiple rows of traffic or into buildings, better to stay firm. Some of the traffic signals though they do not even bother any more to bury them, just leave the block on the pavement, and bury the cable. Shortest interval was around 1 hour, I saw them replacing the pole, drove past a half hour later and they were just leaving and a hour later I was going home and it had a taxi parked where it was, it being in the road sharing it with a fleet of towtrucks and ambulances.

these bases are designed to make the pole fall away from the direction of impact so it generally won't land in a traffic lane. Half the kockdowns i see the arm and light gets ran over by the car that struck the pole but the pole itself is able to be remounted. the signal poles here are not breakaway. if you hit one of those at 60MPH it's your loss lol. at lower speeds the breakaway base does less good but when you're on the freeway going at 60-80MPH, the breakaway base does much more good than bad, though when aluminum poles that aren't breakaway get hit here, they ususally shear away from the impact.

Over here the breakaway poles are usually only used on freeway and highways where a falling pole won't hit pedestrians or buildings. The signal poles don't have a base but I find most shear off at the base plate after impact.

Most non-breakaway poles here are direct buried concrete and so are impossible to retrofit to breakaway.