a Facebook lighting group a POSTER stated there utility would fit incandescent bulbs in there HID street lights that are "marked for replacement"
is this widely done in the USA?
in my experience in MY area power delivery to the pole is FAR less reliable then the gear in the lantern making such a task "mostly pointless"
and where the lantern is at fault the line crew have a replacement on hand and will swap out at time of service call
 

Doesn’t happen here. If the light can’t be replaced on the spot, they leave the non functioning one in place until they can get to replace it with whatever they planned. Usually, they use LED. I believe HPS rental lights are relamped and the PC changed if they have spare lamps on the truck and that the fixture still works. Otherwise, it gets changed to LED.

As for street lights, anything that has to be done up the pole is accompanied with a LED replacement if it is still HID. This applies to lights whose purpose is to light the street and happens rarely because there is only a handful of missouts from the mass conversion years ago.

With privately owned and maintained low wattage medium base HPS, owners do replace the lamps with incandescent, CFL or LED because the proper HPS is ‘too expensive’. Because they have a simple choke ballast with 120V OCV, it works, although dimmer.