Quite a lot. Southwest and Jet Blue have a flight like once an hour going each way all day long most days and I'm sure all the other airlines have several flights a day. I'm guessing that there are 30-50 flights per day carrying like 120 people each.
This, so much this. I live in Nor Cal but grew up in So Cal. I have made that drive at least 100 times over the years, and it is a long boring drive. Getting on a plane is fine, but when you take the drive time to the airport, arriving ahead of time, getting off the plane, the total time is probably close to 3 hours even though the flight is only an hour or so. So while I prefer to fly down there if I can, it is a huge pain in the ass if the whole family goes (7 of us total), and expensive as shit.
So using the higher end of your estimate, there are ~2 flights per hour, or ~240 people per hour. The ~840 the hyperloop is aiming for looks like a pretty solid improvement to me.
Yeah, a better option for travel creates demand. When I used to visit a girlfriend in LA from the bay area flying was really kind of a wash vs. driving. The ticket was a bit more than it cost for gas and the time usually came out similar. If the flight was delayed an hour it was probably exactly the same as driving and then you don't have a car when you get down there and public transportation obviously isn't an option in LA. If there was a fast, inexpensive, and painless method to get back and forth the number of people going back and forth would increase dramatically.
I doubt there would be TSA for this since it's not in the air and can't be commandeered to be a vessel of destruction. This seems like it wouldn't be much different than a train. Which means no security at all.
I thought the paper called for airport-like security. Regardless, I think it gets somewhere in between no security and airport security since, as you said, it can't be commandeered. It would be a prime target though, so I could see to gov't protecting their investment with security checks.
Perhaps they can build the support towers ready to hold a second set of tubes at fairly low additional cost. So scaling would just involve dropping a second set of tubes into place.
The "rail-gun" launch method typically gets burned by track length limitations. A track long enough to limit acceleration to where it doesn't crush the people & items inside while still hitting exit velocity from ~ground level is extremely long. And before you say "But Haast, just build a super long track then point them up at the end LOL", don't forget about centrifugal force. If you are damn near exit velocity and do a turn, hello mega G force, and you're people & items carried are now component materials.
Yeah but who cares.
Too much wasted space in a tube for most products. The tubes would have to be fucking huge to compensate for that. Trucking and train industry isn't going anywhere.
