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That's a very rosy view, only looking at the positive side of the coin and ignoring the negative side.

>1. You can live in a less expensive area, (i.e. miles away), and work in a major center.

...causing property values to rise in the "less expensive area" to match those in the urban center minus the cost of transport. Ultimately you're gentrifying the current residents out of their homes, causing more urban sprawl, and increasing land use pressure on agricultural land and wilderness.

>Basically once you have super fast transportation, it relieves pressure to housing prices on the work hubs/city centers

...shifting that pressure to surrounding rural areas. TANSTAAFL.

You talk about "huge economic positive impacts," but it sounds awfully like wealth transfer from rural people (which we're apparently ignoring?) to urban people. Given the audience on HN this bias is unsurprising, but still disappointingly common.

> ...causing property values to rise in the "less expensive area" to match those in the urban center minus the cost of transport.

This is a valid concern made invalid by the speed of the Hyperloop. If we estimate very conservatively that the Hyperloop can cut the average commute time 4x, then the radius that a city worker can live increases 4x. However, while the radius increases 4x, the area increases 16x (A=pi*r^2: area increases exponentially as a function of r). Thus, the rise in property values in surrounding areas would be distributed over a large area so as not to make life unsustainable for those already there.

Quickly, that's not exponential, it's quadratic.

More importantly though, it doesn't fix the travel time issue that well. It only speeds up a particular section of the journey and only between two specific points. You would need vast amounts spreading out with lots of stops to get close to a squaring.

The housing pressure from San Francisco looks like it currently extends at least as far as Gilroy to me (houses going for 1/2 million dollars).

That's without it being a viable commute to the peninsula.

http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekdaytimetable.html

It's presumably a viable commute to the south bay?

Why commute ? Remote working is a thing and everything the topic comes up, something that a significant part of HN is already enjoying. No need to pour billions in public transport.

Also companies have proven that they are more than willing to outsource everywhere, hiring people anywhere. There are reason they still hire in very expensive place like SF. You bet that it is a problem that will go away at some point, and very likely a significant part of HN readership is working hard solving it.

You need to realise that moving commuter to the city centre is a race to the bottom. Stuff like hyperloop are a perfectly fine way to spend private investment money, but as far as public money is concerned, that would be better to invest it in area that look beyond a world where physical location is an employee primary competitive advantage.

Well... observable trends atm is that physical location still matters. Remote work is more common, but at the same time major centres for tech industries (SF famously, but also others around the world) are pulling in more residents who are going there for work

Getting people to workplaces is a thing we need in 2017, and I expect in 2027. Beyond that, who knows.

> observable trends atm is that physical location still matters

Sure, we're still in the shallow part of the disruption curve. The real world (established player) has two features that Skype/Hangouts/Slack/VR (disruptive player) can't do yet:

- eye contact

- a semi-conscious background channel

Group video calls are confusing without eye contact. You can't really pay half attention to Slack. You read, or you don't read.

But within 5 years or so you should be able to buy a $400 VR headset which lets you make eye contact with someone, and place a semi-interesting conversation between coworkers in the background behind your virtual desk.

And of course the VR workplace has many benefits which will never be replicated by a real world workplace. It's a classic disruptive technology. Small market now. Will eat almost all of office space within 20 years.

With great collaborative tools, a greater concern for carbon emissions, and the cost-saving benefits of working remotely, daily commutes to the office will decline.

I would be lonely doing remote work. I prefer to go to an office and interact with people every day. Sometimes I don't want to interact with them, but I wouldn't want to spend 8 hours a day alone in my house.

Coworking spaces might work. I haven't tried it, but I imagine its different interacting with people who aren't relevant to what you're doing all day.

You won't be alone, you'll be in a virtual office overlooking the Swiss alps, and all of your coworkers will have a mute button.

That sounds suspiciously close to "I go to work to drown my loneliness". Might have not been your intention but it definitely sounded that way.

To me, work is work -- no attachments. I happen to like several of my remote colleagues quite a bit but I am doing just fine in my life if I don't chat with them for a month or two.

> Also companies have proven that they are more than willing to outsource everywhere, hiring people anywhere.

Debatable. Googlers complain of pressure to relocate to Mountain View (despite using video even for intra-campus meetings), Mayer shut down telecommuting at Yahoo, Facebook built the biggest open office in the world.

..in theory. In practice, SF, can probably grow it's commuting catchment area (supply) by quite a lot before housing prices start to give. I would predict that you'd just end up with a bigger SF.

#1 most of the time isn't true because public transportation is very poor in those areas.