>>It amazes me to see how many power lines run overhead in the USA and Canada. To me it seems funny to have, say, traffic lights hanging from cables strewn across the road. Over here all power goes underground after the cross-country pylons bring it into the main sub-stations. There aren't so many telephone lines coming from telegraph (as they're still called over here) poles anymore even (our street is quite exceptional but, being Victorian, there is no under-road infrastructure other than the drains).
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>I suspect this is one of those cases where size is the big issue. North America is just so big that the difference in cost between running above-ground and underground cable is probably huge. It also may be related to when the cables were first put in. I also suspect that in much of North America, the cables were there before the inhabitants. (That is, electricity and phone were strung across huge spans of area to connect places that existed and then folks settled in between.)
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>Tamar

That's more or less as I suspected. Staying with my cousin in the suburbs of Toronto I was puzzled to see whopping great power lines, with those ceramic isolator things on them, running down at an angle into her garden, supplying several houses around. It was interesting last year when I had a telephone failure. I phoned to report it and got through, of course, to a guy in India. After a while he informed me that it was a fault with the underground cables. I thought this was strange in that we don't have underground phone lines, but carried on the telegraph poles. An example of local knowledge being lost when phone centres are relocated. It also suggested to me that in India, with personal phone ownership probably being a lot more recent than here, they have the modern infrastructure. As in the US, we're left with the legacy of its early construction.

Terry