Citroën embrace their inner lunatic.
Why does that look like a Lego model?
It’s a Citroen. It’s a French arty thing.
Because it’s pretty much made of Lego.
But burying power lines is too hard, right?
Totally ruined the neighborhood.
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I used to live right around there years ago, but I imagine the McMansions and condos already took care of a lot of that.
Yeah
Yeah, lots of tear downs and new builds. Mostly the cereal box-type single family homes, but there are some straight McMansions going up on single lots. Some roads have been fixed recently, but many of the sidewalks are still Himalayan and there are wooden telegraph poles everywhere.
Thinking about it, if they are going to put in these giant metal poles so that they can eliminate the old poles, have fewer poles and raise the strung lines above the treetops and sight lines of the houses, then it’s at least an ethos. It will suck for those with a metal giant in front of their house (corner lots may become less desirable), but overall it could be an improvement.
But, as above, they need to re-do almost all the sidewalks anyway, so why not do that and bury the lines while they’re at it? Fairview for sure is one street with sidewalks in dire need of being re-laid.
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Because fuck pedestrians, that’s why.
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They have an easy reason to protest their property value.
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That’s probably poor consolation to waking up to a sequoia of a utility pole in your front yard.
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You seen the cell towers disguised as trees? They should have tried something like that.
They should have buried the goddam cables is what they should have done.
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I wonder if the city factors in the destruction of its tax base when it costs out the various options for handling power lines…
I assume this is a rhetorical question.
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There’s so much they could have done to include the urban environment communities and made this a PR win instead of a nightmare. Have a decorative transmission pole design contest with engineering firms and let the residents choose which they like. Use concrete filled steel poles (like the Valmont MusclePole) that are less than half the diameter, are the same cost and still meet modern storm resistance standards. Allow residents to decorate the bottom 30’ of the pole (painting, mounted bird houses, etc…). Here in Vermont, much of the transmission is underground but the utility allows local artists to “bid” on painting the above ground transmission junction boxes (about the size of a mid-sized car and typically in someone’s front yard near the sidewalk). Homeowners actively petition artists they like since it can add to homeowner value.
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No such consideration down here. When I moved into my new build in Montrose, the builder had replaced all the sidewalks, added a grass verge and made nice ramps down to the street at the corner. Because it was a corner lot in Montrose, there were already 4 wooden power poles wrapping around the house, so that we had power lines in view from the main windows.
This wasn’t enough for the City, though. Not long after we moved in, they came and put in another pole, right in front of the living room window, complete with a pair of transformers. They fucked up a lot of the grass, and destroyed the ramps which they patched up by shoveling some asphalt into the holes.
The most galling part of all this was that the transformers were needed to service new builds going in on the other side of the street! Those were cereal boxes, so there was nowhere to put the pole (the City said), so they plonked it in front of our window and strung lines across the street to the new houses.
I miss living in that neighborhood, but I don’t miss those power lines. And with the City now deploying these mega poles, I can see that our old corner is a prime candidate to get one.
Reminds me of all the hurricane-killed oak trees in Galveston that they carved into cool stuff.
Who is lining up to read a 10,000-character tweet? There’s bold and italic formatting you say? Oh, well in that case…
Speaking of that, I use the Google Flipboard app to view Twitter (the native app is terrible).
Or, I did.
Several days ago Flipboard stopped supporting Twitter, or Twitter stopped being supported.
Either way, it went away and I decided not to look for another app.
And my life has been just fine.
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