[pnut]

My answer to the question, is 'NO'.

I love trains, and use them whenever possible.

However, with static start and endpoints, and existing low-cost air infrastructure that is dynamically reroutable and equivalently fast, why spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate something so fragile and limited?

Municipalities are wisely, generally in a 'wait and see' phase for the next decade, as autonomous personal transport guarantees to spur the redesign and redevelopment of entire cities and transportation infrastructure.

[jerf]

The autonomous transport you mention in the end is also an issue for Hyperloop directly. Highways are "easy mode" for autonomous cars, so automated services to move you between cities may be available substantially before they can necessarily move you within the city. Sure, they'll be a lot slower than the hyperloop, but they'll probably be a lot cheaper. Perhaps the hyperloop could win the deploy-to-production race with fully autonomous cars, but at this point, I bet it can't win the race with autonomous cross-city quasi-personal transport.

[stcredzero]

I wonder how the economics would work out for something the size of a bus, but with much better aerodynamics? (Perhaps with laminar flow boundary devices?)