> Surely they could have put a cable duct, trench or similar alongside it, or an under the adjacent cycle path. Maintenance would surely be cheaper too.

Burying a cable is 3x to 10x more expensive than running it overhead. [1]

Although faults are less common, they become much more expensive to fix - digging the cables up to fix is expensive, and it's even more expensive when you don't know quite where the fault is and you need a bunch of exploratory digging.

And unlike California, Austria doesn't have a load of wildfire problems.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/111524_Un... https://www.theiet.org/media/ss5ndfti/electricity-transmissi...