Substeading

Book excerpt: Radically improved urban transportation would greatly improve our quality of life and standard of living, and substeading would achieve this. Substeading is homesteading underground; it is a legal process that would allow new privately owned corridors to be brought into productive use from the unused subsurface. Substeading is economically powerful, based on proven technology, and could transform big cities in a generation. It would create brand-new and conveniently-located rights-of-way, ideal for new urban transportation networks and other infrastructure. This would pave the way for bigger and better cities by nurturing new construction and infrastructure technologies and by eroding regulatory obstacles to new development. Substeading is also politically practical because it has minimal environmental impacts, requires no government funding, and doesn’t use eminent domain.