I think you'd get people wanting to do that for the novelty, maybe once. Your departure "port" would wind up being Marina del Rey. Even if you lived down the street in Santa Monica, the time to get to the "port", board, etc, it's just a diminishing return of time investment. If you're okay with getting to Santa Barbara in 2 hours, you just make the drive. If you want to go faster, you're taking a helicopter. If you want the relaxing scenery for a longer duration without driving, you take the Surfliner.

The holy grail for this thing is SF-to-Marina del Rey, at a decent passenger load, without stopping. If it can pull that off, some enterprising company will buy 50 of these things and run a shuttle that competes with the San Jose to LAX commuter routes.

>If you want to go faster, you're taking a helicopter. If you want the relaxing scenery for a longer duration without driving, you take the Surfliner.

The cost difference between a helicopter and a shuttle is huge though. I can easily see this being closer to the shuttle cost, while also closer to the helicopter speed. Seems like a sensible middle ground to me.