> Okay, so perhaps the worst case scenario is only goods are shipped in the tunnels - taking all semi-trucks off the roads for at least the major long-haul routes?

So, in this scenario, you could only do that if each major long-haul route had a tunnel. And you made the tunnel wider, as the current tunnels — where the only cost-saving TBC has demonstrated of any kind so far is by limiting the size — aren't big enough to fit an American standard intermodal container, and only just fit the ISO containers (with so little margin you have to care about the turning circle even if you could fit the carrier into the circular gap around the boxy cross-section). And that's without also considering that current trucks definitely don't fit no matter which size standard is considered, so either you'd need the tunnels even wider or you'd need something custom-designed to fit.

High axle weights cause more damage to the surface, which is really bad for a tunnel where you can't just go around a pot-hole, so you want something hard-wearing, something like steel. Even if you use maglev, looking at current maglev research trains, you've got a speed-up zone where you still have contact.

But you don't need to cover the whole surface in steel, because unlike a road where the vehicles might move sideways, this is so tight that there's only one place for the wheels to even be. And if you do that, you could get rid of the batteries entirely by hooking these steel wheel-paths to the mains.

But then you can save money on the vacuum systems, because if you put all the ISO containers in a row: as each container will be in the slip-steam of the one ahead of it, a chain of 10 will have the same impact as a 10x reduction in air resistance.

Oh look, it's now either a railway or a subway depending on if you bother with the "underground" part.

> I'm not sure you're correct about being unable to open and get out of a vehicle in such the tunnels.

The pictures I've seen show negligible clearance between the bottom of the car doors and the curve of the wall. Also, I talked to a civil engineer.

But if you're talking about an evacuated tunnel, then leaving is lethal even if it's physically possible.

> We go through security checks, etc, at airports to save time - what level of "inconvenience" are people willing to implement or follow if a ~5 hour drive can turn into say a ~30 minute ride in a Hyperloop?

Hyperloop in particular (as in, not just the tunnel) is about the speed, so it only makes sense to wait 30 minutes for security etc. if you can go sufficiently faster than a car would have. But is this a point-to-point system in a network that connects everywhere to everywhere else, like a road, or a hub-to-hub system? If it's the former, then those 30 minutes could've taken you 15 miles at residential speeds or 35 miles at motorway speeds (in the UK, I don't know US norms) — a delay like that means there's no point even trying to make it like the road network, so QED it will be hub-to-hub; but if it's hub-to-hub, you now also need to factor in the time it takes to get from wherever you are to your closest starting hub, and in reverse at the far end the time between your ultimate destination and its nearest finishing hub in addition to factoring in the delay for security.

But hub-to-hub can't replace all semi-trucks off the road — at least around here, they go to each supermarket, and I've got something like 8 supermarkets with articulated lorry loading bays within a 15 minute walk from my apartment.

Given the big-rigs aren't going away without an absurd degree of extra infrastructure build-out (never mind tunnelling, that kind of density is more like "raise city by 10 meters and rebrand old roads as 'hyperloop'"), if you're going to have a setup with hubs that far apart, why not just use a plane (for long distances, with security delays) or a train (for shorter distances, without the hassle of security)?

> Also, in the Hyperloop almost vacuum state that's planned, fire will be less of a problem

Not so, li-ion can undergo runaway thermal failure even in a total vacuum. And a vacuum is a great insulator, so that will stay hot for a long time. I'm having trouble finding how hot these get (the numbers are all over the place, and are in any case mostly about car fires), but the lower ranges are still in the "melt aluminium" range of temperatures. And if this is in the configuration where you take a car onto a pod or other travel vehicle, that's in the section with air anyway. If you can't take your car with you, it looks a lot like conventional public transport.

> Arguably so long as cost of implementation is less than or the same cost than current existing infrastructure costs, where the time savings are arguably up to invaluable - but a cost per ride for each person using the system will be determinable, then it can be a great alternative especially with the positives of how it allows transport regardless of winter weather conditions, etc.

Those conditionals are load-bearing.

The creation of a tunnel is generally more expensive than the same length of railway. Where land is expensive enough to make up the difference (e.g. old cities), or where terrain adds complications (go from one side of a mountain range to the other), tunnels are already used and quite often (but not always) rails are put in those tunnels — with a lot of safety considerations and backups for when things inevitably do go wrong, many of which can't work in an evacuated tunnel. TBC hasn't made any newsworthy dents to that price (sadly), all they've done to reduce costs is make the tunnels so narrow they barely fit a car.

Busses also reduce congestion on surface roads, just by having more people per square meter. Down-side is the same hub-to-hub consideration, up-side is flexibility when one route is unavailable for repairs.

For long distances where high speed is the critical issue, aircraft already exist. Extra cost-saving: no need to evacuate the tunnel, gravity already did it for you. And if you need to rapidly leave the evacuated section, not only do the oxygen masks drop, so does the plane — and, unlike in a tunnel emergency, this doesn't cause all the planes behind it to get stuck.

If weather is a critical issue, then you would need an everywhere-to-everywhere network, but as previously mentioned, that doesn't work with a 30-minute delay to get started — to give a concrete example, 30 minutes into my commute is when I get off the underground and walk the rest of the way to my office.