Rudman's city: It's time to end the trench digging and start talking

It was a sight for sore eyes: a newly dug utilities trench running up Hobson St with five matching plastic ducts lying side by side.

For once, it seemed, the rival telecommunications companies had taken the city council's pleas to heart and were sharing one trench.

Over the summer months, city officials have endeavoured to control the invasion of the ditch-digging telcos by power of persuasion.

Because utility providers have a legal right-of-way to dig and bury along our public streets, persuasion was about the only weapon the city had.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see that in the United States, where utility companies enjoy similar free access, some cities have been willing to take the utility companies on. With, it must be said, mixed success.

As in New Zealand, the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the US has set off a war for new customers between competing providers.

All of them want to build competing fibre or cable networks along public streets with the resulting upheavals to traffic, and damage to the road surfaces.

Cities across the US are now saying "enough" and trying to regulate where and when streets can be dug up.

One of the big concerns is the financial impact on tight city road maintenance budgets of repeated utility cuts into streets.

Santa Monica, California, found the average life of streets was reduced 64 per cent by utility cuts. Austin, Texas, said between 2 per cent and 40 per cent.

Burlington, Vermont, found the average life of patched sections was 8.5 years but the average age of unpatched pavements was 25.9 years.

Los Angeles and San Francisco report similar problems.

Many cities have taken the same approach as Auckland and encouraged co-trenching, where providers share a common trench.

Some, like Baltimore, have taken this a step further. It has called for tenders for a trench with room for 20 large ducts. Telcos are being told if they don't take an advantage of the trench now, they'll miss out. Once closed up, the street in question will remain untouched for three years. Similar trenches are planned elsewhere in the city.

Not surprisingly, the telecommunications industry has hit back across the US, persuading legislators in several states to curtail the regulatory zeal of the cities in these matters.

Here in Auckland, as far as the inner city is concerned, it's a bit late for debating ways of forcing the utility companies to take a more cooperative approach to their ditch digging.

But we do still have time to look after the suburbs. Large stretches of the older residential areas continue to endure overhead power and telephone lines.

Waiting in the wings is Australian telecommunications giant TelstraSaturn, which is itching to add to the wirescape with its ugly black cables.

The city's only line of defence against this visual pollution appears to be an insistence that TelstraSaturn undergo a notified resource consent hearing before planning commissioners.

Unfortunately, the outcome of such a hearing cannot be guaranteed.

But perhaps there's another way.

TelstraSaturn's overhead plans are dependent on hitching a ride on someone else's poles.

Somehow I can't see those poles being the ones owned by their arch-rival Telecom.

That leaves the power company Vector.

Yet Vector's owners, the Auckland Energy Consumer Trust elected last year, did a deal with the Auckland City Council pledging, among other things, that Vector would "resume a well-planned programme to underground powerlines in its areas of Auckland, Manukau and Papakura."

This would make the said power poles redundant.

Now I suppose Vector could gift or lease them to some other utility. That's what happened in Devonport, where the local power company undergrounded its wires and handed the poles over to Telecom.

But for Vector to do that is hardly in the spirit of the agreement with the city council, which is about cleaning up the skyscape.

So if the power poles are coming down over the next few years, surely it makes more sense for the various utilities - Vector, TelstraSaturn and Telecom - to work together on a joint undergrounding programme throughout suburbia.

It might take some persuasion from local and central politicians and a bit of agitation from you and me, the customers and residents, but it makes more sense than any of the likely alternatives.