With all due respect you were missing the point.
With all due respect, I believe I was responding to the question of whether the ticket price for Hyperloop could be comparable to Amtrak:
if the Hyperloop works that will demolish any other choice if the price were comparable. Could it actually happen?
Assuming the Hyperloop as built is similar to what has been presented, rather than some totally different project with the same name (I don't discount Musk's willingness to replace the product, like he did with the Solar Roof)...
The answer is no. That could not actually happen, unless Musk really did become the subsidy queen which some accuse him of (and I don't think he will).
As presented, Hyperloop lacks nearly all of the economies of scale of trains, and has higher running costs. It also has very substantial additional construction costs compared to using existing right-of-way, even if they're lower than current US tunnel-drilling costs.
You can't take something with fewer economies of scale, higher per-unit operating costs, and higher capital costs, and price it cheaper -- unless you're just subsidizing it more. You would have to actually have a cost advantage somewhere in order to price it cheaper.
If you were asking some other question, you didn't ask it.
I have to add, plenty of absolute statements are absolutely true. Ever learn any mathematics? Physics? Chemistry? Biology?
It's much less common to be able to make reliable absolutely true statements in the social sciences, but there are a few in economics, mostly in specialized subfields where the grounding is really solid. In fact knowing one of these -- borrowing short term and lending long-term requires constant refinancing, and a bank run on the financing of a company doing this will cause business failure unless some other source of financing bails them out -- led me to make my accurate evaluation of SolarCity's pre-merger business model.
I repeat: if I see a revised version of Hyperloop with trains which hold a reasonable ("train sized") number of people per train, I'll start taking it seriously. Then I'll check whether they've solved the customer vomiting problem. Then I'll check whether they have any sort of solution for the surface-level construction costs, which are the bloated part of civil construction. So far they have none of the three. This means they are not even at square one yet.
Chevrolet Volt
