In light of the recent (Sept. 2021) power outages relating to storms and flooding, I've been thinking about a new version of a question that's been asked many times before: why not bury electrical cables when laying road?
I believe this would address multiple issues of normal underground cabling:
No need to dig separate trenches. Since road is already ostensibly being laid on a suitable surface, we can simply place an undergound cabling shroud physically embedded in or directly adjacent to the road.
Protection against erosion and other ground stresses. The road-embedded cabling benefits from the structural integrity of the road itself.
Cables follow natural routes for power delivery. Since electricity is usually delivered to locations where there is already a road-based route leading to them, there's no need to construct new routes for underground/aboveground cabling.
Easy access. Unlike a soil-buried cable, a road-buried cable could have a manhole-like detachable cover which wouldn't be swept away by erosion and could be physically anchored to road.
This seems like it would remove the major costs of cable burying and add some marginal costs to road laying. The main downsides I can think of are:
the need to coordinate road-laying and cable-laying
a solution to upgrade existing roads
potentially much longer paths for cable to follow (although overhead lines seem to follow roads anyway)
Are there any other reasons why this wouldn't work?