Almost every building project created today features a wireless landscape: beautiful, wide streets bordered by generous sidewalks and green lawns uncluttered by ugly telephone poles, acres of black wire, and dangerous guy wires. We can't go into the past and talk the builders into doing it right, but we can create a friendly financial climate in which builders today would be unlikely to make a decision for ugliness. The difference in cost between placing wires underground and stringing them up on poles is often quiet a small percentage of the total building costs. Communities could vote to allow tax advantages for the purpose of modernizing the infra structure with the latest in technology. Laws could also be passed to make it necessary to get the planning board's approval to initiate a wires-on-poles plan for a new wireless community. Where thousands of telephone poles line a stretch of highway, the chances are high that a vehicle will run into one of them. Where poles and wires exist, bonds could be floated for the purpose of conversion to underground utilities and matched by federal funds. Repairing winter storm damage to overhead wires and the delays in fixing them would be avoided by converting to underground facilities. Just think of the millions of Americans who lost their electric power for a week because of the hurricane Ivan. Those millions of dollars used to put back the poles could have been spent on better things. Of course, there is much work to be done legally to clear the way for such a program. Perhaps one dollar per citizen toward a 'City Upgrade' crusade could be used to raise millions of dollars for such a fund. I can think of no personal valid objection to the completion of the beatification and efficiency of our towns and cities. Sidewalks in may European cities are composed of one foot square concrete blocks that make it quick and easy to repair and update the underground infrastructure. At the same time, underground garages, garbage pick-up, product deliveries, and rear service entrances could be all done efficiently and out of sight. When builders and planners are presented with carte blanche options that spell out a reduction of bottom line profits, allowing above ground electric and communication facilities, pecuniary interests of course prevail. It is up to the American citizens to tell the local and federal governments what course to follow and insist on the needed laws be put in place. America is the finest country in the world, but you'd never know it, looking at the rat's nest of wires overhead. Just think of all the trees we would save. |
