San Francisco Utility Poles

San Francisco, The City by the Bay, has unique architectural and cultural identify. It’s famous for its bridges to old victorian houses, but also for being a leading city in tech (most recently, in AI). However, one thing that I noticed when I moved here over 10 years ago is that its infrastructure is lagging behind other big cities, at least in Europe. For example, back in 2014, there was very limited fiber optics infrastucture, but things look much better today (although, I’m still stuck with cable internet). But what is even more fascinating to me is amount of utility poles in San Francisco, especially near the Sunset district. Let’s take a look at the current state (source):

So, you may wonder how does that look today? Let’s take a look:

What else to say then: so ugly it’s beautiful. There’s a fair amount of Reddit posts about this too:, e.g. pretty in their own way, or aging utility pole replacement. Some even make nice artwork too: like this one and and this one.

San Francisco started utility undergrounding back in 1960s, and with another push in 1990s. The undergrounding projects are expensive and complex, and also increase the maintenance cost resulting in stalled projects. But, there is a new push to burry the utilities. So, maybe San Francisco will no longer have ugly-beautiful poles in the next decade but I wouldn’t bet on it.