The suggested route for the Greater Los Angeles Area to the San Francisco Bay Area system outlined in the alpha-level design document would begin around Sylmar, just south of the Tejon Pass, approximately follow the I-5 highway to the north, and arrive at a station near Hayward on the east side of San Francisco Bay. Several proposed branches were also shown in the design document, including Sacramento, Anaheim, San Diego, and Las Vegas.[2]
While terminating the Hyperloop route on the fringes of the two major metropolitan areas would result in significant cost savings in construction, it would require that passengers traveling to and from Downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco, and any other community beyond Sylmar and Hayward, transfer to another transportation mode in order to reach their final destination. This would significantly lengthen the total travel time to those destinations.[8] A similar problem already affects present day air travel, where on short routes (like LAX-SFO) the travel time between airport and airport is only a rather small part of door to door travel time. Critics have argued that this would significantly reduce the proposed cost and/or time savings of Hyperloop as compared to the California High Speed Rail project that will serve downtown stations in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.[24][25][26]