What you say is true if what you are trying to do is replace flights between San Francisco and Los Angeles. However that assumes that all of California between those two cities is flyover country. Going down I5, where there are essentially no people, forces everyone in the other cities to use the train as if it was a plane: Reserve the Airporter or drive forty miles and pay for parking. The idea is to have center-city stations and encourage growth to be there. The other option is to pave over even more agricultural land with suburbia.

There recently was a congressional hearing on HSR in San Francisco. The reason it was called by the Republican committee head was to denigrate HSR once again. But the ranking member, who is from Boston, pointed out that most of the ridership on the Northeast Corridor is not going between Boston, New York and Washington. At least one end point of most trips is in a smaller city.

Another reason for the routing is to get to the cities and still be able to run at high speed between them for an affordable price for the real estate. Sometimes practicality requires compromise. Even Mr. Trump is starting to realize that. :-)