Benefits of urban underground power delivery

From the community point of view, there are clear and distinct advantages in having all urban power lines underground. Utility companies, operating in a regulated monopoly status, basically have no incentive to accommodate the public in the matters discussed. In general, citizen groups have been unsuccessful in working directly with the utility companies, though some success has been achieved through court action. Moreover, the limited attempt to generate a successful forcing action through the legislative process was unsuccessful except that the effort provided a large amount of data that had heretofore been unavailable for analysis. The problems remain, however, and the public seems to be becoming increasingly aware of them. The undergrounding of urban power lines as a national policy would generate very significant benefits to the public. These benefits are such that in-depth studies to quantify the cost-benefits and for the development of logical methods for cost sharing are needed, The utility companies have no incentive to sponsor such studies as current laws do not require any consideration of societal costs. A reasonable approach, therefore, would be through state legislative action to open the electric power industry to full retail competition and let the market forces bring about this long overdue improvement. An alternative approach could be for legislatures to require utilities to operate in such a manner as to minimize the aggregate of societal costs associated with urban power delivery.