“As you know, we’re playing catch-up. Thirteen years at not meeting industry standards is kind of difficult to catch up on, but by ‘28 we’ll be fully caught up, and then we’ll go on our five-year cycle," he said. “We are trimming trees; as we stand here today, we have about 50 or 60 crews out there.”
The city is burying lines bit by bit. More than 50% of AE’s lines are already buried, and the city especially tries to bury lines with all new home and road construction, just like those other 3 are buried with new construction. What is much more expensive is burying them after the fact, which requires tearing up existing infrastructure. Also, building and maintaining the gas, water, and sewer infrastructure is incredibly expensive but literally necessary, where burying electric transmission lines is not necessary. If you’ve ever had to have work done to repair a sewer line you know how much more expensive, labor intensive, destructive, and time consuming that work is than anything electrical
That appears to be true with all the new builds in southeast. I see very few transmission lines and lots of road side boxes in the new developments around me