[Hipster Duck]

I don't think that burying street wires will come at the expense of better transit. Those are two different budgets.

I also don't think overhead wires are a symptom of 'cheapness'. I think hydro wires should have been a) buried as major street repairs came up, and, b) put in alleyways like they are in other cities where they run above ground. With respect to (a), we keep on missing the boat on this. Dundas Street west recently had a complete street overhaul, with new streetcar tracks, asphalt road surface and sidewalks. Despite this multi-year streetscaping project, they still kept the ratty old poles intact. Why?!

Finally, I disagree that hydro wires are primarily about aesthetics. If that were the case, suburban subdivisions built by developers/municipalities that don't give a rat's ass about the public realm would be festooned with wooden poles. On the contrary, almost every subdivision built since the 1960s has the wires buried underground. There are practical reasons for ensuring that they're buried.

We 'pay' for overhead wires in many other ways then our eyes. They're constantly being downed in wind storms; they make fire fighting more onerous; they prevent the maturation of street trees, and we have to pay union workers in special vehicles to go around every neighbourhood and trim trees for this reason; sometimes wires leading down from them to the ground are not properly insulated and dogs get electrocuted...I could go on.

 

[Lenser]

But in a city like Toronto, where the budget is already strapped and all sorts of things are jostling for priority, budgeting itself is a political act; certain things are routinely sacrificed so that certain other things get implemented.

City workers are still going to be working on trees that are on city property... certain species are like weeds and need to be tamed fairly often. This is not merely so that the trees look good, it's also to prevent dangerous situations with deadfall and overgrown trees encroaching on residential and commercial property, etc. So you won't get perhaps as much savings as you might wish in that regard. Too, I expect digging up buried wires (for repairs / overhauls) amount to roughly as much wallop to the taxpayer as repairing overhead wires - but at least they're not exposed to crazy weather, sure.

It would be nice to get rid of those overhead wires all the same. I just think that, if there's only so much money in the city coffers, I'd rather see it going to something that helps the city's inhabitants get around better.

 

[spider]

Buried utilities versus aerial infrastructure.

As a retired Bell engineering manager whose duties included the design of facilities to be placed in new subdivisions and rural applications as well as urban renewal projects I know a thing or two about all those poles and wires that blot out the sun in some locations.

1960 was indeed a watershed year that saw the trend towards building less aerial infrastructure and more buried plant, both Bell and Hydro and later Cable TV in all three scenarios.

In new subdivisions the parties shared the same trench and lateral run-offs to the homes, all the digging was done by machine and there were no driveways or sidewalks in the way. The ongoing advantage of fewer storm or other damage was a sweetener.

Rural locations were reinforced by placing buried cable in the boulevard/ditch instead of adding another cable to a pole line that was possibly too far gone to stand the strain of another cable. The cable was placed by one or more bulldozers that forced a plowshare down 3 feet and laid the cable through it. This method was a little less than exact in the route of the train and the cable it laid was not all that straight and parallel to the fence line as designed . A right of way for a second cable 5 or 10 years later was rarely forthcoming from the municipality so it was back to poles and aerial construction.

Rebuilding aerial plant in the urban environment poses many problems. A lot of downtown Toronto Telephone and Cable service was originally placed in back lanes on poles, the Hydro service was and still is in the front street. Buried front street construction to replace aged or inadequate aerial services would be incredibly expensive for two reasons. The shared trench location in the boulevard area usually assigned to such utilities is about 12 feet back of the curb on most inner city street profiles, take a look out your window at that location. I bet it is full of trees ,gardens, driveways, parking pads etc, the City requires contractors to tunnel these features rather than machine cut and fill. To access the same point on your home that your meter or telephone/cable service wire enters is probably a bigger nightmare than the trench down the street.

Bottom line, too expensive and intrusive to private property owners. Imagine one home owner on the street who refuses entry to their property , and he or she is there believe me, and the entire project is dead in the water.

 

[MisterF]

^Then how do other cities manage to bury their hydro infrastructure? Not to mention the streets in Toronto that have done it, and main streets of countless small towns all over Ontario?

 

[pman]

Buried utilities versus aerial infrastructure.

As a retired Bell engineering manager whose duties included the design of facilities to be placed in new subdivisions and rural applications as well as urban renewal projects I know a thing or two about all those poles and wires that blot out the sun in some locations.

1960 was indeed a watershed year that saw the trend towards building less aerial infrastructure and more buried plant, both Bell and Hydro and later Cable TV in all three scenarios.

In new subdivisions the parties shared the same trench and lateral run-offs to the homes, all the digging was done by machine and there were no driveways or sidewalks in the way. The ongoing advantage of fewer storm or other damage was a sweetener.

Rural locations were reinforced by placing buried cable in the boulevard/ditch instead of adding another cable to a pole line that was possibly too far gone to stand the strain of another cable. The cable was placed by one or more bulldozers that forced a plowshare down 3 feet and laid the cable through it. This method was a little less than exact in the route of the train and the cable it laid was not all that straight and parallel to the fence line as designed . A right of way for a second cable 5 or 10 years later was rarely forthcoming from the municipality so it was back to poles and aerial construction.

Rebuilding aerial plant in the urban environment poses many problems. A lot of downtown Toronto Telephone and Cable service was originally placed in back lanes on poles, the Hydro service was and still is in the front street. Buried front street construction to replace aged or inadequate aerial services would be incredibly expensive for two reasons. The shared trench location in the boulevard area usually assigned to such utilities is about 12 feet back of the curb on most inner city street profiles, take a look out your window at that location. I bet it is full of trees ,gardens, driveways, parking pads etc, the City requires contractors to tunnel these features rather than machine cut and fill. To access the same point on your home that your meter or telephone/cable service wire enters is probably a bigger nightmare than the trench down the street.

Bottom line, too expensive and intrusive to private property owners. Imagine one home owner on the street who refuses entry to their property , and he or she is there believe me, and the entire project is dead in the water.

1. Would it be at least financially feasible to bury the wires when the city completely digs up the street and sidewalks to bare dirt and replaces them, as it did recently with Dundas around Bathurst? If every single item of the visible public realm is replaced, down to the dirt, why do the 1910-vintage wooden poles stay in place?

2. The homeowner opposition is a red herring - Enbridge recently redid the gas lines on our street and our options were either to let them tear up our property or have them shut off our gas supply permanently. Toronto orders homeowners to modify their property (like downspout disconnection) or give utilities access all the time.

3. I'm curious about your opinion on utility cuts. It seems that phone, gas, cable and water work are completely uncoordinated, resulting in degraded streets and sidewalks. Why can't the City force your former employer and other utilities to (a) coordinate their work so the same patch of road/sidewalk isn't constantly being ripped up and spot repaired with asphalt, and (b) do a decent repair job on the road and sidewalk so that it isn't wrecked by freeze/thaw cycles? Much as I hate overhead wires (and I guess I started the subject on this thread), I'd suggest that crappily repaired utility cuts are just as iconic of Toronto as our frontier-town overhead wires.

 

[spider]

1. Would it be at least financially feasible to bury the wires when the city completely digs up the street and sidewalks to bare dirt and replaces them, as it did recently with Dundas around Bathurst? If every single item of the visible public realm is replaced, down to the dirt, why do the 1910-vintage wooden poles stay in place?

It is highly unlikely that average sized buildings in this area would be serviced by Bell and Rogers from pole lines on the street, they would be located in the back lanes or attached to the rear wall of the buildings. I am only guessing but it is an informed guess as to why Hydro did not choose to "underground" their distribution. In order to do so they would have to build manholes, conduit and transformer vaults underground in a street profile that didn't have room for them. Also, each building now served by an attachment on it's front wall would have to alter their store front to allow a conduit from the Hydro transformer location to be placed in order to connect to the same service entrance or provide a conduit into the building basement for a new panel and possibly rewire the building to some extent. After all this, some poles would remain for street lights, transit overhead and traffic signage.

2. The homeowner opposition is a red herring - Enbridge recently redid the gas lines on our street and our options were either to let them tear up our property or have them shut off our gas supply permanently. Toronto orders homeowners to modify their property (like downspout disconnection) or give utilities access all the time.

I am sure the gas service replacement was a safety issue, not a cosmetic enhancement. The City never forces a ROW on it's citizens' property to the advantage of Bell or Rogers, trust me I have been there over and over again and never won once. It will be a frosty Friday when the City forces a citizen to comply with the downspout connection programme

3. I'm curious about your opinion on utility cuts. It seems that phone, gas, cable and water work are completely uncoordinated, resulting in degraded streets and sidewalks. Why can't the City force your former employer and other utilities to (a) coordinate their work so the same patch of road/sidewalk isn't constantly being ripped up and spot repaired with asphalt, and (b) do a decent repair job on the road and sidewalk so that it isn't wrecked by freeze/thaw cycles? Much as I hate overhead wires (and I guess I started the subject on this thread), I'd suggest that crappily repaired utility cuts are just as iconic of Toronto as our frontier-town overhead wires.

The City does have and distribute a schedule of projected road repairs and resurfacing for the purpose of having Utilities do their work before the City starts their work. This system doesn't work very well as you have noted. The various utilities march to different drums and co-ordination of their efforts is way down the list if it makes the list at all. The worst offender by far was Hydro, at least during the time I was involved.

(a) the vast majority of pavement cuts are made for repair purposes and are by definition not schedulable (is that a word).

(b) Utilities and their contractors are specifically not allowed to patch cuts with concrete. The degradation of the repairs is more a function of the City not making permanent repairs in a timely fashion.

 

[Urban Shocker]

The wooden utility poles could be carved by artists, like totem poles.

 

[neubilder]

Toronto doesn't know it's left toe from it's dorsal aspect, I mean, there isn't very well integrated coordination between municipal services. It could be a logistical nightmare to bury overhead wires at least until they really put their heads together and get things figured out.

In Holland (the grass is greener, over there) they have services so well figured out, and have had for so long, that they have special stones and buried ducts in designated zones in their respective locations to maintain and modify underground services. They rarely have to tear up streets, they just use their 'access conduits' and then fit them back into place with elegant stone and brick paving systems.