it says they need 5 - 6 million passengers a year although it's unclear as to whether those are single trip or return trip passengers.
lets be generous and say they're single trips which means you need 3 million return trip passengers. that means you need to carry 8,219 passengers per day each way. assuming your travel is going to take place over a 15 hour period (say 6:30 am to 10:00 pm) that's 548 passengers per hour.
the typically hyped pods carry between 28 and 40 passengers. if 40 passenger pods are used at 75% capacity, it will take 18 pods to carry 548 passengers per hour. 18 pods per hour is 9 per 1/2 hour trip. for a 1/2 hour trip that means 3 minutes and 20 seconds headway.
if 28 passenger pods are used at an average 75% capacity, it will take 26 pods to carry 548 passengers per hour. 26 pods per hour is 13 per 1/2 hour trip. For a 1/2 hour trip that means 2 minutes and 30 seconds headway.
you can't unload and load a pod in 2 minutes and 30 seconds, particularly if you are going to provide both security and cleaning so you need quite a fleet of pods to try and deliver that headway.
and that's before you introduce those "freight pods" which probably need separate terminals for both loading and unloading so they need their own pods and their own headway.
for comparison, at subway speeds toronto transit uses a 2 minute headway for their ridership projections and 5 minutes for lrt. now think about the difference in speeds between lrt and hyperlink and what would be needed to maintain a safe headway margin.
the only thing i've found that's even close to a hyperlink "study" is this now dated university exercise:
https://www.cesarnet.ca/sites/defaul...5PosterT06.pdf
it says hyperloop makes sense if you could:
capture
60% of all calgary - edmonton travel!
capture
30% of all calgary - edmonton freight movement!
do we really need to do any more analysis of the underlying financial assumptions needed to make it work financially even if you could make it work physically?
as for the system, it said hyperloops
can reach speeds of up to 1,200 km/hour and should be operational by 2030!
their analysis was based on the smaller 28 passenger pods. i shudder to think about what the headway would have to be reduced to in order to meet those numbers or how many elevated tunnels would need to be integrated and work flawlessly and simultaneously to provide a realistic headway.
and now you're going to stretch this all out not from suburb to core but run it between two cities 300 km apart in a fully enclosed tightly fitted chamber in a climate that sees perhaps the largest seasonal changes in temperature of anywhere in the world.
what could possibly go wrong?