Unexpected Problems

The 2015 estimate of $86 has increased to a more accurate $105 in the present, which is frequently much more expensive than booking a simple one-way ticket between the two cities would be. All of these problems have been brought on by the project's countless, innumerable setbacks. The geography of California itself is one of the most important. The southern coast ranges, transversal ranges, and peninsula ranges are the three main mountain ranges that the rail will eventually pass through; these ranges notably call for building time-consuming, expensive tunnels across seismically active areas. Moreover, California has the second-highest average real estate prices of any state in the union, making it too expensive to buy and acquire land for the rail to traverse. The project has had trouble acquiring the required land ever since it began, but even today there are still more than 200 parcels that the railway needs to purchase in order to finish out the central backers field to Mercedes segment in Kings County. This isn't really good for them because construction on this route has obviously already started, and they really need that land at pretty much any price the land can sell it to them.

In 2014, the World Bank revealed that the cost of California's high-speed rail system per kilometer was estimated to be over 56 million, which is absurdly higher than in other nations like China, where it is more like 19 million, or around one third of the price. Similar high-speed rail projects have only cost between $25 and $39 million per kilometer of track in Europe, but costs are uniform throughout California. Because the land is essentially just flat rural farmland everywhere, that is just the cheapest place to actually build out the infrastructure, which is part of the reason why the plan was to build a central segment of the high speed rail first across the Central Valley in the first place. This plan has been roundly criticized for building the train nowhere between Bakersfield and Marsai.