This week we finally found out the route of HS2 past Birmingham. The UK’s new 250mph high-speed train will run, at a total stated cost of £55.7bn, towards the East Midlands Hub, then on to Chesterfield and Leeds, before joining on to the existing network to York. The second branch will connect Birmingham Curzon to Crewe, before taking trains to Manchester Piccadilly and Warrington.

This news has led me to try and do a little bit of economic crystal ball gazing about the impact of driverless car; and whether long distance passenger rail travel will actually be disrupted out of existence.

I confess that I have lost track of HS2 Ltd’s latest business case for the project; and perhaps ironically I could benefit from a long tortuous journey on a Pacer train in my home county of Yorkshire to familiarise myself with their latest thinking. However, what I will say is that the UK is not the only country considering significant and expensive infrastructure plans to build high speed networks, with the California high-speed rail project aiming to cut travel time from San Francisco to the Los Angeles basin.

The question is will the tens of billions that the politicians are planning to spend on these things be dead money and a complete waste?

In my mind there are two things that trains are very good at. The first is moving huge quantities of freight, thousands of tonnes at a time around the country and even around the world on the new silk road train route stretching from Yiwu, China to Barking. The second is moving immense numbers of people in and out of urban areas – the trains and tubes in London for example.

The joy of train travel is that you don’t have to drive, and the drag of it is that you lack flexibility. You have to get to the station and that will only deliver you to another station, and not your required destination. A driverless car will be as comfortable as a train, will take you point to point and you still don’t have to drive; and the point to point convenience will mean that many people could prefer it for long distance journeys.

But, what about emissions? Trains are electric and cars run on polluting petrol or diesel. In short, the arrival of the driverless car will mean that we care less about the performance of a car, why put a V8 engine into something that will be controlled by a computer? Even if this switch takes longer than expected we will see expediential increases in fuel miles per gallon and with the advent of electric and hydrogen fuels car pollution could be a concern of the past.

So, if there is no noticeable environmental benefit to a train, and no time benefit to a train, and we don’t have to drive when we take the car, then won’t we all be taking the car over the train?