Fully underground
Electrical and telecommunications both buried. No distribution poles on the street.
Prince Edward Island
What our new streets look like — and what they could look like.
Charlottetown, Stratford and Cornwall already make developers bury every other service — water, sewer and storm drainage all go underground before a single house is sold. The power and internet lines are the only things left out. So some new streets get them buried, some get half, and some get poles down both sides — decided street by street, by no rule at all. If everything else under the street is buried while the trench is open, why not the wires?
This site exists to make that visible. Photographs of streets being built here today, side by side with what the same street looks like without the poles.
What this site is
An information resource for residents, councillors and provincial staff. It is not a formal proposal, a petition, or a submission on behalf of any applicant or project. Nobody here is asking for a specific development to be approved or refused.
It sets out what is being built now, what the current bylaws do and do not say, what other Canadian municipalities require, and what the alternative looks like — so the conversation can start from shared facts rather than from impressions.
Images marked Digitally simulated are illustrations, produced by editing a photograph of a real street. Every alteration made to each one is listed beneath it. The underlying photographs are unaltered.
Three streets, three different answers
These are not different eras or different towns. This is what gets built now, under the same rules, in the same municipalities.
Partially underground
Some services buried and others overhead — most often electrical underground with telecommunications still strung on poles, which leaves the poles standing anyway.
Fully overhead
Electrical, telecommunications and street lighting all carried on poles down one or both sides of the street.
The middle case is the one people miss. Burying the electrical but leaving telecommunications on poles means the poles stay — so the street pays most of the cost of undergrounding and keeps the wires anyway. That happens because the bylaws that mention utilities at all are written around power. Why telecommunications is the real gap →
Start anywhere
Examples
Streets on the Island
Real subdivisions in Charlottetown, Stratford and Cornwall, photographed as built, each shown against the same view without the poles.
4 streets so far →The gapNothing covers telecommunications
Where power is mentioned in a bylaw at all, telecom usually is not — which is how a street ends up with buried cable and poles at the same time.
Read on →Why it mattersBenefits, and the next fifty years
Storm resilience after Fiona, what ratepayers are already paying for poles, maintenance, property value, and what a street can become once the wires are gone.
Read on →StreetscapeTrees planted with the subdivision
Other municipalities require street trees at construction, not decades later. Overhead conductors are one of the main reasons that cannot happen here.
Read on →ReferenceWhat the three bylaws say
The current text from Charlottetown, Stratford and Cornwall, quoted with section numbers, including the one place where undergrounding is already required.
Read on →Share it
Anyone is welcome to use these images and findings when talking to neighbours, a community association, a councillor or provincial staff. Every source is listed and linked, so nothing here has to be taken on trust.
If you have a street worth photographing — particularly one built fully underground, or one where the standard changes partway through the subdivision — that is exactly the kind of example this site needs.
Check the sources