[yellowapple]

I rather strongly disagree. Connecting the smaller metro areas to the bigger metro areas opens up a lot of opportunities for both ends. The smaller metro areas become more accessible and thus amenable to growth. The larger metro areas get to relieve the pressure on housing costs as people can move to more affordable areas (thus paving the way for them to in turn grow even further).

A statewide high-speed rail system is ultimately going to be a hard dependency on California continuing to grow and prosper for another century in the same way it has for the previous century. The approach to doing that needs a major rework, of course, but such a rail system is in the best interests of the state as a whole.

[phil21]

Interconnecting the smaller cities in the region is entirely pointless until you achieve usable mass transit within the major city cores themselves. Otherwise great - you can take HSR from your sleepy small town exurb, but have no usable way to get to your final destination on either end so it ends up mostly being a novelty and serving a tiny handful of commuters. This pattern is observed in almost the entire US except a tiny handful of east coast cities and perhaps Chicago.

Once you have a workable transit network on at least one side of the connection, branching out high speed rail to smaller "feeder" cities can induce demand and start creating denser development in those feeder cities to make the transit even more useful.

The Netherlands is a great example here in my opinion. Lots of smaller suburbs/towns within 40 minutes on the high speed trains, typically with a walkable community on the "feeder" city side and either a walkable destination or a tram ride on the Amsterdam Centraal side.

I cannot see a point to point HSR line being very useful if all it connects are essentially two train stations to nowhere.

Basically I don't see a point in building HSR or commuter rail if the citizens of the major city it's built into require car ownership to realistically get around. This means there isn't a network robust enough to support bringing feeder traffic into. Or put another way - it'd be pretty silly for an airline to create a route between two cities, but have no connecting flights on either end. Sure, it's useful for a very few - but not really economically viable at scale.

[yellowapple]

There's no reason why we have to wait for the intra-city transit to develop before developing the inter-city transit, though. Ideally they'd happen in parallel, with the inter-city rail fanning the flames of demand for robust intra-city mass transit.

And we should be clear here that "mass transit" within a city (especially one the size of Merced or Bakersfield) doesn't necessarily mean a full-blown metro network. Even a decently-sized bus system would be a step in the right direction (and in fact might be all that's practical or necessary for the smaller cities). On that note, both Merced and Bakersfield do already have bus networks, and the rail connection between the two would be a good way to spur further expansion.

The "two train stations to nowhere" are - from what I can gather - a temporary situation while we rejustify the rest of the network. Those stations are likely already in-progress and too late to cancel (probably because they were the easiest).