What's right with this picture? No overhead wires!

London is so different from Toronto, which is too cheap to do things right

It must be 30 years ago now when Toronto upgraded its electrical system from 4kV to 27 kV and replaced every wire and transformer and most poles in the city. I remember one city councillor, Howard Levine, asking why the city wasn’t taking this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to underground (bury) all the wires. Everyone screamed IT WILL COST FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS! or some big number (I may be off by a zero) and people can’t afford it. Levine pointed out that it will last fifty years and pay for itself in many ways.

So instead we have electric wires coming to the front of our house, which have more than once been taken down by trees,

And a mess of telephone, cable and fibre in the rear, often taken down by rodents living in the boxes.

They don’t have this in London; it’s all buried. I have spent some time looking down at the sidewalk, examining all the boxes and plates that cover the infrastructure. My favourite is labelled “Post Office” and “telegraphs”- If I didn’t know any better I would think they get their mail and telegrams in pneumatic tubes.

I don’t know what LE PLC stands for; there is an entire website devoted to manhole covers and it apparently doesn’t either.

At some point the Post Office got modern and switched from telegraphs to telephones, which are now almost as extinct.

This electricity supply box looks like it has been here since Michael Faraday was around.

Water and sewer access panels (they really shouldn’t be called manhole covers) are common and varied in design. Here is a modern one saying “don’t steal me!”

Thames Water is everywhere. This company fascinates me; It was around for hundreds of years, privatized, and in 2017 a big share was sold to OMERS, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System.

Who is running this fund, Mike Harris? I wonder what the unionized government employees who capably run Ontario water systems think about their pension fund owning a reviled company that is spreading shit across the country. I am surprised that they haven’t risen up in protest.

My favourite is right in front of my sister’s house; I have no idea what it covers, but I love the pattern and the hand and boot prints in the concrete in front of it.

I have no idea what this one covers either, and I am not lifting it up to find out.

As long as we are looking down instead of up, I will point out that London curb cuts are short and steep while the majority of the sidewalk is level, unlike Toronto where I have complained about the roller coaster sidewalks. They are worrying more about the pedestrians than the cars’ delicate bottoms, which is the way it should be.

But back to the wiring. If a city like London can afford to underground all its wiring, even though there is probably an archaelogical wonder at the bottom of every excavation, surely Bell and Rogers and Hydro can do the same in Toronto. If Doug Ford lets the gas company amortize the cost of infrastructure over 40 years, surely the other utilities can do the same. We shouldn’t have to live with such ugliness.

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UPDATE: After writing this, I took the train to St. Albans to have lunch with author Alex Johnson of The Writing Hut. On Alex’s street there were telephone poles and these weird radiating telephone wires going for very long distances, there seem to be two poles per block. Electricity is buried.

The sidewalk is a rollercoaster deathtrap even though they just repaved the road. In Toronto at least they try to fix the sidewalk at the same time. So I can’t just blame Toronto for being shortsighted and cheap; there seems to be enough of this to go around.