San Antonio <-> Austin <-> Dallas
Houston <-> Dallas
House <-> San Antonio
That'd link up 14—17 million people. Expected growth is another 10 million over the next 20 years.At an average speed of 600mph, it'd be about 25m commute between points, worst case.
It seems like the strength of the Hyperloop is extremely fast travel over long distances. Personally, I think having a line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles would be awesome, as the traffic can be horrible on that route, especially on weekends and probably significantly affects traffic in LA in general. Its also around 100 miles less than the LA to SF route, through mostly undeveloped desert, so it could be a lot cheaper to build.
No, which is why it's strictly city-to-city. It's supposed to compete with short haul point to point airlines. Those don't have neighborhood stops either.
For the Hyperloop to make any sense in a shorter distance metro setting, you'd probably want to have no stops between where you start and your destination. (So you might go directly from Anaheim to Santa Monica, for example) With smaller cars/trains, this may be possible (since you might be able to fill trains quickly enough to not make people wait too long), but potentially very expensive to build enough lanes to manage that amount of traffic with greatly varying speeds efficiently.
Without that sort of system, however, I think the additional stops would delay you so much that the gain over a traditional metro train would be small and not worth the extra expense of building it.