Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Design and the City
reburb commentor hibou pointed me to this Citizen column where David Reevely discusses the design of city infrastructure components, such as power poles. There are no shortage of poles and wires along the strip. It's quite jarring to see beautiful facades like The Spa and Al's surrounded by a forrest of creosote poles and guy wires, and bordered by abandoned lots. The Spa especially, since they put a lot of effort into their landscaping.
There's also a high voltage right-of-way that bisects the community, under which there are soccer fields and playgrounds in Lynwood and Williams Parks.
Since we need electricity, we need power poles. But imagine if they looked like these French poles?
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4 comments:
Lynwood Village is beautiful but one drawback is the ugly above ground residential electrical lines.
I think we missed the cut-off by only a few years- in the late fifties, early sixties, when Teron was building Lynwood Village, they weren't burying hydro lines, but by the late sixties they were. For example, in my mom's neighbourhood in Katimavik everything is buried.
The *only* advantage of the above-ground wires is that it means some people have very large back yards (for the high-tension wires). For the rest of us, we have the ugly wood poles in the back yard, and no extra real-estate.
Plus it's very expensive for the Hydro guys to come and trim back the trees. A team of three or four guys comes every year near my house and they occasionally have to bring in a massive cherry-picker to tackle the really big trees so that branches can't fall on the lines. I can't think of any possible solution, though- it'd be way too expensive to bury them now. During the Ice Storm I lived in a community where the lines were buried and we only lost power for a couple of hours- I wonder what it was like in Lynwood Village?
It's probably difficult/expensive to bury them now, but not impossible. Doing a quick google on "burying hydro lines" turns up lots of interesting links, and lots of examples where it has been done. EG, here's something on work done in Toronto:
http://www.toronto.ca/wes/techservices/involved/transportation/st-clair_construction/faq.htm#a3
I wonder how long it would take hydro to recoup the costs of burying based on yearly tree trimming and other maintenance costs?
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