Yeah, I can't see very clearly on the little map posted. Some of the routing diagrams appear to go into SF proper, but the suggested station location appears to be just south of Oakland (tptacek says Hayward). It's on the BART line, but yeah, it's like an hour to SF on the BART, then.

I don't see how poorly chosen station locations invalidates the plan, though - those are just proposals, perhaps because it would be much more involved to estimate land prices within the city. It'll make it much more expensive than the figures they mention, but that doesn't make the overall concept much less interesting, since the land rights will almost certainly still be much cheaper than an on-the-ground solution like the current HSR that we seem to be willing to build.

The costs are based on Hayward to Sylmar. You can draw whichever lines on a map you want, but rights of way into SF proper and downtown LA are intractably expensive. Again, this is an advantage HSR has over "Hyperloops": HSR can reuse preexisting last-mile right of ways, and Hyperloops simply can't.

One critique of Musk's plan pointed out that the Shinkansen trains were essentially a frivolous novelty until they were brought into city centers. The same thing was true of Southwest Airlines trying to service NYC from Idlewild. You have to terminate transit lines at places people want to go.

Also, the bar you're trying to set for critiquing the Hyperloop is too high. An argument against Musk's plan need not show that it's impossible to build. Rather, the bar is simply that an unproven new technology must have significantly better cost and performance characteristics than HSR. Nobody is going to drop many tens of billions of dollars to build this thing "just because".

And yet slow inefficient trains are being proposed, and have a very good chance of being built 'just because'.

The Hyperloop concept at least can point out the folly of pie-in-the-sky projections.

There are two parts to the Hyperloop "proposal": one is the technology, which is interesting; the other is the route, the cost, the politics. There are critiques of the technology and boosterism of the technology -- I'm not able to judge, and I don't doubt that the idea is cool and possibly a way to build a high speed interconnect from some arbitrary point A to some other arbitrary point B.

But the rest of it, the ridiculous route proposed, the estimates of right-of-ways and construction costs, and the comparison to the CA HSR plans that are going forward -- invited explicitly by Musk -- those parts of the plan are ipso facto nonsensical. That's why some people think it's just a tactical salvo of disinformation aimed at fragmenting what political support CA HSR has.

> I don't see how poorly chosen station locations invalidates the plan though - those are just proposals, perhaps because it would be much more involved to estimate land prices within the city.

They invalidate the plan as an alternative to the HSR plan, which doesn't avoid the issue of connecting places people actually are to places people actually want to get, which is kind of an important part of any mass transit proposal.