Actually it's not just quick and easy expediency.
There is an actual reason many US cities use elevated lines versus underground utilities.
Houses and building lots in the US tend to be much larger than their European counterparts. This makes neighborhoods bigger and means that utilities have to span a much further distance to serve the same number of customers.
When you take this to a city-wide level the grid for an American city is exponentially larger than that of a comparably populated European one. (I say American, but I could just as easily say in the Americas as housing in Mexico or many other places looks pretty much identical in structure to that in any US or Canadian neighborhood).
When you send a signal through a wire a certain amount of that signal is leaked out and lost to the surroundings. Whether it be electricity, cable, data, or phone, as the distance increases, the amount of signal dispersed to the surrounding environment increases. In elevated lines, the air itself acts as an insulator to signal loss.
Because the earth is a natural ground (actually THE natural ground) its proximity to wires actually exacerbates signal loss quite a bit so that underground utilities are only practical on short runs.
In many densely populated places like New Orleans of New York you will find underground utilities, but you will also find huge ventilation grates in the streets to vent the substations. The actual main runs of the wires are from those with the general areas being served with trunk service from larger elevated lines somewhere.
It's not a matter of doing something on the cheap because it's quick and easy, it's a matter or one technology not being practical in one situation where in another place the opposing technology is he most ideal..
(oh yeah one foreigner thing that's funny...foreigners being the mindset that because somethings done a certain way 'back home' that that's the best way to do it!)
couldn't help myself lol