If it could be bigger and more comfortable it seems it would be more usable and with more chance not to fail. Then it would have sense to also be more expensive to make it and maintain it.
Especially after the first case of somebody going sick after he enters the tube and having to remain in it the next 29 minutes. Imagine you sitting next to that person. Imagine you being that person. Imagine your kid being that person. Imagine the press ("Mother watched her kid dying for 29 minutes in Hyperloop"). Imagine the reactions. The project would be dead for good after a few such cases.
You can't put normal people in the capsules for astronauts and just think "what could possibly go wrong." Health issues and effects are real problems and have to be considered. The public is used to car traffic accidents. It won't be so for the whole new transportation suited only for astronauts. This can be the start of the grand failure.
The bathroom critique is again silly--it's a thirty minute trip; if you can't hold it that long, you probably need to repeat preschool.
This would happen. A lot. Then imagine who'd use that cleverness after the first such case and after every next.
I'd rather say "it's aimed at astronauts" than "commuters." Astronauts are thoroughly checked by medical teams and prepared before their trips, would you suggest such checks and preparations every time for everybody entering the tube?
One of the reason's California's proposed high speed railway was so expensive was the politics involved in picking the route. It's also the same problem Amtrak has. The northeast corridor would make money, but the routs going west don't and are kept do to congressional pressure. The hyperloop's cost comparisons don't factor that in at all(nor should they). But building it in practice will be an issue.
The second part of the hyperloop's cost savings come from it being very light. We could simply build very light rail transport on the same pylons. Replace 1,500 KG of batteries with overhead electric wire and use the excess weight for a motor.
So the hyper-loops only real advantage is speed. Which is impressive, except for the fact that it requires you to build a tube with surface variances less than 5mm for several hundred miles, or the air barring will have problems. (or maybe not, perhaps you could have dynamic air barring and high precision topographic maps of the tunnel)
The budget summary at the end suggested $2.5 billion for land acquisition etc, which made me think it's not a serious proposal.
We already have rail transport on pylons, usually an implementation of a monorail[1], but it only solves the right-of-way issue. Everything else (energy consumption, speed, efficiency, passenger flow, safety) is not much different from standard transportation.
The speed is the huge benefit, but involves a technical challenge of rather unknown cost: how do you build a tube for hundreds of miles with a down smooth surface at the 5mm level.
Energy savings are mostly moot if you power things from overhead wire/ third rail. Electricity is cheap(I'm actually curious why this isn't part of the proposal).
So it's benefit is speed. It's a very big benefit, but the tolerances for the air baring/tunnel wall it rides on are really really small.
More likely answer to the headline question: they will do the same thing with the hyperloop as with the maglev (ignore it).
The US government didn't ignore maglev, they did a lot of study (including paying for me and my boss to travel to Germany to perform noise and vibration measurements on the TR08) and offered to help finance starter systems. It didn't go anywhere because it was hella expensive, not because of apathy.
Seems it was the precursor of Consumer Reports, but CR was founded when the majority of the staff left in 1936 and founded a new publication. In the 77 years since, it seems the old organization's main achievement is still... that place everyone left to found Consumer Reports.
