If you look north of Flagstaff in Arizona, there aren't many places to stop. They need infrastructure to place one of these stations, and they're promising that

If you look north of Flagstaff in Arizona, there aren't many places to stop. They need infrastructure to place one of these stations, and they're promising that each stop will have restaurants (and hotels?) nearby. My first thought was local politics (offers of free land in places trying to attract tourists come to mind), but I'm now leaning toward the fact that they just routed around completely barren areas where they couldn't get the station spacing correct.