Took this picture today. Working on full voltage too!

I asked, and they prefer this before using a ladder or lift.

dsk

With a street right there, it would be a bucket truck job. That said, the local utility here still has pole climbing as required in the training regimen.

Back in the day my Telco roomie would splice a 200 pair phone cable on gaffs.

Depending on the work site location now you need to plan days out if you want to use a bucket truck to access a pole for a non emergency job. There are street use permits, barricades/cone rentals, road flaggers, and crash truck rentals etc to be considered.

Gone are the days of stopping the truck, turning on the orange rooftop beacon and laying out a few cones and the Men at work sign.

They still just stop and set up here. Sometimes we see cones, other time the attitude seems to be "didn't you see the truck"? It seems every utility, tree trimmer and contractor has a bucket truck these days. They are also starting to use concrete poles so the gaffs won't work.

OK, I have to add a few things....
State roadways require traffic control (Cones, signs, police, etc)
Local roads for the most part, cones & flashing lights.
County roads, similar to State roads.
Limited access roads, traffic control full setup & police.

It's interesting to see the LED light conversion crews now having to have the crash attenuation truck follow behind them on the high speed highways here in Manitoba. A few years ago nobody know what those trucks were or who to rent them from.

I have only seen limited use of concrete poles as at test street a few years ago, but see more of the laminated poles being used where the spans change direction. Not sure if one can gaff them as I have only seen bucket trucks doing the installations.

I guess I am a little farther out of town and they get away with more here. This area of Florida was smart enough to get wide right of way areas bought while they could afford it. Usually the truck can get off the road on the grass, since the poles are always on the property owner edge of the ROW.
I am sure you can't climb a fiberglass pole with gaffs but there might be some other rig. I doubt OSHA would approve anything like that in the 21st century tho.
The 230kv line behind my house is 90' up on a concrete pole. The last time they looked at that they used a drone. The guy told me, if something needed fixing, I was going to see a helicopter.

Pole climbing over here in New Zealand was never really a thing.
If you needed to get up a pole carrying 400/230V lines, you used an extension- type
pole ladder.
The same if you needed access to the 11kV lines above the LV lines.

Once bucket trucks happened on the scene in the 80's, use of pole ladders was confined to line crews moving stuff on poles during pole change-overs and faults staff replacing pole-top fuses.

Considering that wooden poles here all have pole steps on them for the higher voltages, you just lean a pole ladder up against them and climb the pole that way.
However, bucket trucks have pretty much taken the need to climb poles at all, due to Health and Safety legislation.

Here pole-climbing was extremely common, not sure how things are today as I live in cable territory with no poles anywhere in sight. In 2005 I worked for an electrical contractor and one day our task was replacing a 16 mm2 drop on a wooden pole with 25 mm2. One of the guys put on gaffs, climbed up and replaced the entire drop in less than half an hour, live of course (230/400 V). That was an allotment-type community and the association had a deal with the distribution network operator - they owned all the overhead network within the community and had slightly laxer regulations for metering enclosures, even though the metering was done by the DNO.

Four allotments shared one pole drop and meter cabinet and our task was to replace the guts of one of these metal cabinets with a new class 2 enclosure (that was the deal with the DNO, otherwise we'd have had to replace the entire metal pedestal instead of just putting fibreglass enclosures inside). The feed out of the meters was upgraded from 4 to 16 mm2 and the drop from 16 to 25. I think the original setup was from the late 60s as the cables going out still had pre-1965 colours but were wired according to the harmonised scheme (old 4-core was black, grey, red, blue and they used blue as the neutral, while originally it would've been grey).

Russian spark climbing a rectangular concrete pole (230/400 V):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pt5jBU5HLs

Interesting rig he has on his boots. I never saw that before but it looks like it works.

Russians are tough. I hope we never have to fight a war with them