Something else to keep in mind with burying utilities is it may not be solely up to the city. Here in Nashville we have a Form-Based Code for the downtown with bonus height that outlines incentives for added height/density. They have been working through a revision to those bonuses that includes burying utilities, but the local utility provider (Nashville Electric Service) specifically said they wanted opt-out language included so they could have final say on burying utilities.
Now obviously Boston is very different from Nashville. For one, Nashville is on top of limestone ledge just below the surface in many places. My point is the utility company will have a lot to say about if the utilities can and should go below grade. As we learned from the Big Dig, there is a tangle of crap below the streets of Boston, and maybe the utility company just doesn't want to do it in certain areas. I agree that burying utilities should be approached from a very holistic approach. Going block-by-block with burying utilities may be more expensive in the long run due to the requirements of vertical movement on power and utilities.
Does anyone know if there is a long-range plan/Capital Improvements line item for relocating utilities below grade? I would presume it would be tied to larger repaving projects, stormwater projects, etc that allow for the utility relocation to piggy back on another project instead of having a separate project just for it.
The TN area is also fairly unique in that you guys, by and large, are served by a municipal or cooperative electric utility - the vast vast majority of your power comes from the TVA, which is federally owned and operated. You guys have some of the best utility rates in the country. There's some spillover into neighboring states, but Nashville Electric Service, Memphis Light etc are all governed ultimately by city government. NES's board is appointed by the mayor, which in your case I suspect is advocating for its position from a place of "this is the thing we're responsible for, we want a say in if it's a good idea." In TN, the rate of folks served by "publicly owned" utilities is nearly 100%. Nationally, it's 28%, vs 66% by "investor owned" private utility companies. That said, several other notable cities/areas have municipal power companies - LA DWP, Phoenix's Salt River Project, and the Long Island Power Authority are the largest.
Those public utilities generally have both lower rates, and are far more responsive to the needs of their local communities. They're just more reliable - the average outage duration is something like 3 hours shorter if you're served by a municipality than an "investor owned" utility, and that's the catch. Something like utility pole relocation because they're blocking the new bike lane, or burying the power line does cost money. The thing is, someone like National Grid or Eversource which are ultimately responsible to their shareholders as S&P 500 components don't have a profit motive to relocate, much less bury utilities. They tend to have fewer crews and resources generally, so as to minimize costs, while returning profits to their shareholders. For example, nationally in 2023 Eversource had net earnings of ~2.4B on ~12B in revenue - that's roughly a 20% margin.
The incentives are just different. That profit motive isn't there for a municipal utility whose shareholder is the city - they don't have to produce a return, so they tend to have the lowest rates and highest consumer satisfaction, and the longest payback cycle. Governments don't care about quarterly returns, so they may as well spend money on burying utilities for the long run benefits.
Nashville can have a coordinated plan with stormwater, a published capital plan etc because for all intents and purposes, NES only does Nashville - and likely works hand in hand with the water service. In Boston's case, I don't know if a developer or the city can even force Eversource to bury the utilities, even if you paid them, since they may not even own them - a substantial number of poles are owned by the legacy phone carriers like Verizon or Comcast, which would then imply a level of coordination in capital spending that is unlikely. Not to say that MA doesn't have municipal utilities - 42 towns do - but not our bigger cities.
Tldr, municipal "publicly owned" utilities measure success by consumer satisfaction and reliability. "Investor owned" utilities measure success by cost controls and financial results.
