Is this Bangkok or New Jersey?
There are four wires connected to my house but only the electric feeder cable and my FIOS service are doing anything. The old copper telephone wire and a DSL cable are obsolete and dead, but they're still hanging overhead tempting a tall truck to tear them down.
Nobody thinks to remove them when they go out of service.
Across the street, on the poles, are at least 30 wires of every conceivable weight and diameter. The poles bend from the tension and the sky is diminished. According to my local Verizon installer at least half those wires are dead and disconnected.
Fo the last hundred years or so utilities have been adding more and more wires without removing the old ones. These unsightly overhead wires are an urban blight, a kind of pollution that the utility companies are not required to clean up. In fact, they've never even been asked.
Compared to the wire-free suburbs of Los Angeles California, where the utilities are underground, my New York neighborhood looks scarred. Our property values and aesthetics sacrificed for the convenience of big telecom.
People talk about air pollution, water pollution, and even light pollution, but I've personally never heard anybody raise this important environmental issue of overhead wire pollution.
New Jersey overhead wires
New York overhead wires
Bangkok overhead wires
Hollywood California
Go Wireless
Looks like landlines are going away permanently. Cable TV is moving to wireless streaming. When will our streets go wireless?
Useless wires are debris. We wouldn't let contractors leave them lying on the ground so why are they allowed to leave them in the air? Seriously, is industrial waste OK as long as it's above our heads or attached to a building?Utilities are given the right of way to use public space and string wires for the public good, and they make money from it. The price of that accomodation should be a responsibility to return the public spaces to their former condition when the wires are no longer needed.
