[jsprinkles]

Daryl Oster's company has submitted proposals to Florida, at least, on building and maintaining a system such as this. I think part of the requirement for submitting such a proposal is at least a cursory cost analysis. Wikipedia reads a bit like the company wrote it itself, but:

The firm fixed bid for the 96-mile (154 km) Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system was $253M, this was less than one tenth of the cost of the bid by Global Rail Consortium to build electrified double track High Speed Rail for $2.6B. The bid by et3 contained letters of support by three entities in China to supply IP and key materials for the project. The engineering consultants hired by the authority did not dispute the validity of the et3 bid price or ETT technology, but recommended to eliminate the et3 bid from consideration for other reasons.[1]

This comment doesn't pass judgment on whether Daryl Oster is a patent troll or not, but that's also a discussion worth having.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuated_Tube_Transport

[ChuckMcM]

Would love to see how they costed that out. Given that I don't know of a single engineering company that can build straight up light rail track for at $2.5M/mile even if you give them the land for free.

Edit: add this update --

Interestingly this link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/843626/posts claims that the ET3 bid was 1.2B$ which is $12.5M/mile which is a lot more credible (still low though since the surrounding infrastructure to keep the tube evacuated, the mag lev stuff, etc all add cost over regular fused rail electrified service (which California is considering for its fast rail) and that is looking closer to $25M/mile in the current state of the art)

[Eliezer]

How the hell does light rail track cost $2.5M/mile? How did people build railroad tracks back in the days of horses and buggys?

[Retric]

A large chunk of the costs of projects like this is building the long flat tunnel/level ground over significant distances. The actual costs of building a moderate vacuum is not that significant. Where this project falls down is in the maintenance and safety side of things not the infrastructure to send the first train down the line.

Don't forget every 10m adds 1atm water pressure. Building a glass enclosed under sea walkway 30m down is not that much harder than building one 20m down and these projects are going to be using glass.