Depends. New poles proposed often carry not just electricity, but also a cellular station, 2 or 3 cameras, 'smart' blazing bright led street lights going on and off at irregular times and 1 or 2 sizable led advertizing displays constatly adapting their messages to perceived passers by.

I can definetly see how replacing a lowly old pole with one of these annoyance towers can lead to strong opposition even for those not having 5G scares.

A lot of power poles have been replaced recently in my town and surrounding area. Most of the newer poles are a bit taller. Some of the A shaped towers were replaced with giant poles. Some giant wooden poles were replaced with towers. For the most part, the changes were aesthetically pretty minimal. Not a single one of the new towers has cameras, a smart LED street light, cellular stations, or sizeable advertising displays.

Most of those other things, I have seen, but on different projects lol. Like the LED street lamps have been phased in on most streets out here over the past few years. They also upgraded the light-up street signs to have LEDs and replaced the yellowed, cracked, faded glass with shiny new glass.

All of those things were super solid improvements though.

Of course, we could just act like the town is evil, defund everything, and then have them sell the rights-of-way to companies that would almost certainly squeeze the blood out of the infrastructure and place advertising on it.

Maybe they'd put cameras and use machine learning to determine which streets are the busiest, and find out more about the demographics of people who walk the street, so they can decide how long to leave the lights on - oh and sell that data to further profit lol.

Burying the cable like every other country on this planet with decent infrastructure does, will not create "a cellular station,2 or 3 cameras, led street light and advertising displays". How would these even work underground?

> Burying the cable like every other country on this planet with decent infrastructure does

I take it you've never been to Japan

Hence a "with decent infrastructure", though I should have narrowed it to "with decent power infra" to be more clear about it.

I don't think the poles are the issue. They're a proxy. The issue is: what happens when you upgrade such infrastructure? The area become more desirable, there's more development, and more "outsiders" move in.

Yeah but presumably that would increase land prices.

Obviously, not everyone values money over peace and quite, and peace of mind. Not everyone loves strip malls and other "mod cons."

Because that requires new permits and new permits require impact studies and approval which must go through the public. Which makes it impossible in areas like that.

Just replacement to exactly what was there does not require that approval.