The biggest expense that the working class pay is rent.
If you can cut long distance commute times in half, then that means that someone who works in the city is able to save 50% or more on rent by living outside the extremely expensive city.
Transportation and housing (2 sides of the same coin) is arguably the single most important issue facing the working class.
Now if hyperloop has stations at various NY locations (JFK, downtown, midtown, uptown) and a couple of Washington locations, that will save a fair amount of time.
I'll believe it when I see it, and when it can cope with 3000 people an hour in each direction
There is of no reason, that the tax payers should be forced to support the risk or even a project that few people under the upper-middle class will benefit from. There is no reason that Elon Musk should be subsidized to create a private monopoly of transportation––quite contrary, he should be paying the government for the externality caused by being privileged to the exclusive right of the vast common land underneath the states; a common land that other tax payers are now deprived from.
Most citizens of the USA don't even live in the city, especially the ones who you claim would benefit from it. They already live in cheap housing in New Jersey 30 minutes away.
Their shareholders are spending their own money to finance this. They are not being subsidized.
Lobbying the government to pay for this instead, would be doing the thing that you are arguing against. Why should the taxpayers pay for this when other people are perfectly willing to spend their money instead?
Not only that, but it would take decades for the government to do it, AND if they were to do it then it would be 10 times more expensive.
However Ryanair was very successful by targettk f "poor" people