I don't disagree with some of your points, but some of your premises are wrong. I take it you don't commute to work from the suburbs? I know plenty of people who commute 4 hours a day to their jobs, in snarling 10 lane freeways, 1 person per polluting vehicle, just for the luxury to live in the suburbs.
HSR has a key benefit other than moving far more people than airplanes on short haul flights of 2 hours or so (6-8 hours driving distance). If you measure distances in time instead of miles, you find that within an hour, an HSR takes you a distance much further than commuting by vehicle and too short for flights, something around 150-200 miles. This could be a huge boom for the economic development of smaller towns out of existing commuting reach when an HSR stop is built there. In the case of California, for example, San Diego to Sacramento would take 2.5 hrs, with stops in Bakersfield, Fresno and Stockton on the way, something neither car nore airplane can do. These 3 cities would see a huge economic boom from the influx of people moving there because commutes are shrunk to sub 1 hour. And this is not speculation; it's been demonstrated wherever HSR has been built.
From a political perspective I can see why Republicans would be against HSR development, because cities vote Democratic in large majority and thus these Republican country towns would eventually turn blue over a couple decades as influx of people create urban diversity.
