Aylesford is well connected if you drive, and badly connected if you don't. The village has its own railway station, and hardly anyone commutes on it. The buses barely run. A third of workers skip the commute and work from home. The car does the work here, and the station is mostly something you drive past.
Aylesford Rail Station is in the village, and New Hythe, East Malling and the Maidstone stations, Maidstone East, Maidstone West and Maidstone Barracks, are all within reach. Even so, only about 3% of working residents take the train to work. Buses are thinner still. There are 3 bus stops in the area, and about 1% of workers commute by bus.
The 2021 Census shows how people get to work. About 49% drive and about 34% work from home. Walking accounts for about 8%, and cycling for about 1%. Car ownership follows the same pattern. About 43% of households have two or more cars, and only about 14% have none. If your plan involves one car between two jobs, check how the neighbours manage it before you rely on the station.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics are modelled for the area as a whole, not timed from any particular front door. They put the nearest town centre about 15 minutes away by car, 28 minutes by public transport, 24 minutes by bike and 64 minutes on foot. That walk is the telling figure. It's over an hour each way to the shops, which is why so many households run two cars.
The same statistics put a GP about 9 minutes away by car, 18 minutes on foot and 17 minutes by public transport. A hospital is about 16 minutes by car and 33 minutes by public transport. A food shop is about 18 minutes' walk or 8 minutes' drive, and the nearest concentration of jobs is about 7 minutes by car or 8 by public transport. The car and walking times are the reliable ones. The public transport times date from 2019 and services have been cut since, so they're the most likely to have got worse.
The bus figures are current, and they aren't encouraging. Each stop averages 3 scheduled departures on a weekday, none of them at peak hour, and none of the stops has any weekend service. That's a bus you catch on purpose, having checked the timetable first, not one you can commute on.
Broadband is better. Superfast broadband is available at about 96% of premises, ultrafast at about 56% and gigabit at about 55%. The third of residents working from home aren't doing it on a dial-up line. Mobile is close to complete: at least one operator covers 100% of the area with 4G or 5G, and all operators together cover about 99%.
Road noise is widespread. Every postcode in the area, 100%, sits near or above the 65-decibel level, which is where official noise mapping starts treating road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. That's a mapped exposure for the area, not a reading from any bedroom, and how loud it sounds in a given house depends on the glazing and which way it faces. Rail noise doesn't register at that level anywhere in the area.
Electric car charging is minimal. The area has 1 public charge point with 2 connectors, and none of them is rapid. So charging an electric car is something you do on your own drive, not something you do while the shopping gets done.
Aylesford is middling on connections. It works for anyone with a car and a decent broadband line, and it works poorly for anyone relying on the timetable.