If you’re traveling in America, there are plenty of ways to get to where you want to go. Interstate highways make road trips possible. Planes let you go from one side of the country to the other in a matter of hours. But there’s one mode of transportation that still eludes the US: high-speed rail. Countries in Europe and Asia have safe high-speed trains that can take you from city to city as fast as 200 miles per hour, while a little more than half of Amtrak trains reach speeds up to 100 miles per hour. So what is the state of high-speed rail in the US?

“Nonexistent and terrible,” says Michael Kimmelman, editor-at-large of the New York Times’s Headway, a section that focuses on progress when it comes to the world’s biggest challenges. “The United States has consistently failed to build high-speed rail, and there’s been conversation about it for a long time.” Despite the setbacks, it still could be on the horizon. “There’s some glimmer of hope. High-speed rail exists all around the world.”

What’s the deal with the lack of high-speed rail in the US? Why hasn’t the country caught up? And will we ever have high-speed trains? That was the question we explored in this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

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