Facts:
Americans spend about $300B per year on domestic airplane tickets.
In the USA, there are ~50,000 miles of interstate highway.
Hyperloop construction costs are about $10-15M/mile
Cost of one Hyperloop trip is about $20 once the line is constructed
Average domestic airline ticket is $400
Number of flights: 700 million
So from these figures we can deduce:
switching from air travel to hyperloop saves 700M * ($400-$20) = ~$250B / year
building a hyperloop system as extensive as the interstate highway costs 50,000 * $15M = $750B
The pay off time is ~3 years. Pretty good - a long way from pie in the sky.
The 700M domestic flights is demand at a price of $400. If you can get an equivalent service at $20, obviously demand goes way up. Perhaps another 700M people value "airline" tickets at $200 but not $400. In that case, economic benefits would also include $700M * ($200-$20). Start adding this into your pay off and you are getting closer to 1-2 years.
When you start taking a closer look rather than order of magnitude calculations done above, it gets better. For example, the airline industry is highly toxic. We still use leaded gas in planes and people living near airports have high rates of developmental problems, lower IQs, etc. Humanitarian catastrophe plus tens of billions in damage every year we can do away with.
Consideration of these sorts of things make the ROI on a hyperloop start looking like something around 100% (one year pay off) pretty quick. No brainer kind of thing.
