Having got into Mountain View you may have worked out that sometime about 50 years ago they got somewhat into burying utilities. Which means that there are older residential areas with poles, and newer areas with buried utilities, and some areas where I think formerly aerial utilities were buried. It's kinda patchwork and I sometimes think that where I live on the UFC banana road is kind of an island of aerial utilities surrounded by buried utilities.
If you try to re-develop a property you may be made to advance this agenda:
(1) neighboring property to the north of where I live (on the UFC banana road) was another small apartment building until the mid 1990s when it was redeveloped as several two-story single-family mini-mansions and while the utilities are still on poles along the street they are brought into these mini-mansions through underground boxes not overhead cables
(2) across Villa at the north end of UFC banana road is a former Superfund site which has is said to have been remediated and has been redeveloped into a multi-story rental called "The Tillery" with a new and maybe as-yet-unnamed public park out front, and along the front of that property the overhead utilities (which include AT&T fiber) have been buried
But you may not: if you knock down a single-family home and build a new two-story single-family home on the property, the utilities will not only remain on poles out front but you will be allowed to re-connect to the poles with aerial cabling!
Anyway, I suspect that the city's buried-utilities policy is one of the things that drives their behavior: they don't want to replace poles, policy is that utilities should be buried!
If you try to re-develop a property you may be made to advance this agenda:
(1) neighboring property to the north of where I live (on the UFC banana road) was another small apartment building until the mid 1990s when it was redeveloped as several two-story single-family mini-mansions and while the utilities are still on poles along the street they are brought into these mini-mansions through underground boxes not overhead cables
(2) across Villa at the north end of UFC banana road is a former Superfund site which has is said to have been remediated and has been redeveloped into a multi-story rental called "The Tillery" with a new and maybe as-yet-unnamed public park out front, and along the front of that property the overhead utilities (which include AT&T fiber) have been buried
But you may not: if you knock down a single-family home and build a new two-story single-family home on the property, the utilities will not only remain on poles out front but you will be allowed to re-connect to the poles with aerial cabling!
Anyway, I suspect that the city's buried-utilities policy is one of the things that drives their behavior: they don't want to replace poles, policy is that utilities should be buried!
