Yeah, I wondered if some sort of on-ramp/off-ramp or multi-lane system might work, but given the distance it would take to get up to full-speed (or decrease spe

Yeah, I wondered if some sort of on-ramp/off-ramp or multi-lane system might work, but given the distance it would take to get up to full-speed (or decrease speed to stop), that could greatly increase the cost of construction, especially if there are a lot of stations. For the Hyperloop to make any sense in a shorter distance metro setting, you'd probably want to have no stops between where you start and your destination. (So you might go directly from Anaheim to Santa Monica, for example) With smaller cars/trains, this may be possible (since you might be able to fill trains quickly enough to not make people wait too long), but potentially very expensive to build enough lanes to manage that amount of traffic with greatly varying speeds efficiently. Without that sort of system, however, I think the additional stops would delay you so much that the gain over a traditional metro train would be small and not worth the extra expense of building it.