content: Why would all Californian's chip in for a loop that only goes from one point to the other unable to make stops in-between? The Concorde was grounded for over a year after its infamous 2000 crash. More recently, the long-delayed, over-budget Boeing 787 Dreamliner's mass deployment has been repeatedly delayed because it can't stop spontaneously catching fire.  You answered your own question earlier on.  People would pay a premium ticket price for the same reason people take planes, only with conceivably less dangers.  There's no other way (yet) to get those kinds of speeds without flying into thinner atmosphere, and this could (potentially) do it at a fraction of the cost.  This testing Hyperloop One is doing will help determine actual pricing points so we don't have to speculate anymore.  What regulatory body would Hyperloop even fall under?  It's a vehicle on rails, so railroad.  Everything from the design of the tubes to the pods need to be exhaustively tested, not just by the designers, but also by the government.  That's not how it works in the transportation industry.  Government provides regulations and test conditions, private companies do the testing.  Then you have to get the land rights.   This.  This is the real issue, and will be the making or breaking of this technology in high population areas.  The design of a practical hyperloop will pretty much have to conform to the shape of existing infrastructure - be it converted railroad lines or sacraficing lanes of major highways.  IMO this will determine how fast the Hyperloop could actually go (and all its cost-benefit "advantages") since you can't make sharp turns at mach 2. Hyperloop's applications for San Francisco may be considered snake oil by some, especially if infrastructure budget is being allocated to these companies first, but Cali takes pride in being a leader of new technologies so it wouldn't surprise me if a working model got some government funding down the line. (Also, BART doesn't cover all the way to LA, so using it to compare doesn't really make sense.) If the numbers don't end up working, it would be very useful tech for other places in the world - just build it and sell it to us!