>>>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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>There is a riveting part of Robert Caro's generally riveting LBJ biography about the electrification of the Hill Country, the part of Texas LBJ grew up in. For those of us who have grown up never knowing life without electricity, it's a fascinating glimpse into how completely it changed people's lives.
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>I think I would have been lost in the days before electricity <g>. We had a three hour power outage here a few Sundays ago, after dark, and I was going insane trying to think of things to do. It probably would have been easier if I didn't live alone <g>. No wonder they had big families back then....

I'm at a loss if we lose the Web for a few hours! :-)