The capacity constraint accusation on the grounds of spacing and max G is pretty bogus. Firstly, there's nothing wrong with running at far more than 0.5g in an

The capacity constraint accusation on the grounds of spacing and max G is pretty bogus. Firstly, there's nothing wrong with running at far more than 0.5g in an emergency. You think a plane stays below 0.5g when it crash lands? You just have to make sure people aren't badly injured, not pamper them - and make sure such emergencies are very rare. Where the author really gets it wrong though is in saying "Maybe he can resolve that by using larger pods. But of course, a larger pod will weigh more. And that will probably mean using stronger steel for the tubes, which means that the cost will go up". That would be true, but if you're happy to resolve the issue with larger pods then you should be equally happy to resolve it with groups of smaller pods travelling at smaller separations. A 737-800 seats around 150 people. Hyperloop passenger capsules seat 30. So no one should have any conceptual issue with running 5 hyperloop capsules in convoy with separation of a couple of seconds. This 'couple of seconds' still means almost 1km, so they're certainly not sharing the same segments of tube, so you don't need to scale the tube design at all. It's still dirt cheap, and you have plenty of capacity, and it's still MUCH safer than a plane because if one capsule has a fault the others following can still likely stop in time (given they're all decelerating at roughly the same speed).