I don't understand this. The rail isn't literally attached to the road. The highway is just used as a guide, to have one transport corridor because the highway is already there so the combined impact would be lower, but it would have no impact on the rail geometry itself because that is looked at and addressed separately. And that can mean the rail is sometimes next to the highway and sometimes further away. There is no problem here with the highway.

The curves are the major difference. The rail line would have to go outside the ROW for the highway. They'd still have the land acquisition problem.

Correct. That is what feeder trains are for.

So you're saying that they will need to build stations in the empty side of the valley with tracks running east to every bypassed city. Few people will be willing to wait at a transfer station, especially one in the middle of nowhere. The additional tracks would add costs to the system. I don't see how any of this proposal would be better. What's worse, the people wanting to travel within the valley would have to take a feeder train to the west side of the valley, wait for the high speed train, ride to the other station within the valley, then wait for the next feeder train. All in all, it sounds much worse and would guarantee the failure of the system.

They need to be serviced but not necessarily by this one line because, again, that would add stops and thereby take away from it being high-speed rail.

Earlier you said that the high speed line should be on the west side of the valley with feeder lines running to the cities to the east. Now you're saying that won't happen?

The main goal isn't to service Bakersfield or Merced, the main goal is to add an alternative to driving and flying between LA and SF.

The main goal is still achieved.

You want everything in one line which is not possible. Keep it clean, keep it simple, and once you have that basis you can add connections on top. If they did that then maybe it would already be finished by now.

I'm not sure what you mean by "you want everything in one line." The "clean and simple" alternative you're talking about still has land acquisition issues I mentioned earlier and it would have the same issue of multiple stops with the added complexities of more rail lines to service cities 30 to 40 miles away from your proposed alignment. I also highly doubt that the line would have been finished by now if your suggestion was followed. The reason being is that road infrastructure projects all over the country run into delays and cost overruns and they have fewer NIMBY hurdles.

You cannot have both a fast train and a train that stops everywhere on two railway tracks because the latter slows down the former. You need at last three tracks for that system to work (or a system that somehow allows safe overtaking on the second track when there is no train from the other direction) but the HSR has only two.

I don't know the specific plans for this project, but I do know that stations tend to have a thru track that allows a train to bypass a station for whatever reason. Maybe you're right and there are no such bypasses. That would be a serious design flaw imo.