Barkingside is well connected for an outer London suburb, as long as you are happy to do most of it by bus or car. The Central line runs through, and the buses are frequent. Very few people commute by train, and the largest single group works from home. Broadband is excellent, and the main roads can be heard from almost every postcode.
The Central line serves Barkingside, and Newbury Park station is on the eastern edge of the area. Ilford Rail Station is the nearest stop on the main line. Even so, only about 5% of Barkingside's workers commuted by train in the 2021 census, and another 5% went by bus. There are 152 bus stops in and around Barkingside, which is a lot of bus stops for very few bus commuters.
The census shows how people here get to work. About 33% worked from home and 30% drove, and those two groups add up to most of the workforce. Walking accounted for about 4% and cycling for under 1%. About 24% of households have no car, and about 28% have two or more. Barkingside lives near a Tube line, but it mostly commutes by car or from home.
The Department for Transport modelled average journey times to the nearest town centre in 2019. By car it takes about 10 minutes, by public transport about 14, by bike about 12, and on foot about 22. The walk is long enough that most people would rather catch a bus.
The same Department for Transport statistics, modelled area averages from 2019, put a GP surgery about 7 minutes away by car, 9 on foot and 8 by public transport. A food store is about 7 minutes by car or on foot. Places of work are about 7 minutes by car and 19 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier, at about 18 minutes by car and 39 by public transport. Distances to fixed destinations like these change slowly, but bus times may have changed since 2019, so the public transport figures are the least reliable of the set. A GP, a food shop and the bus stop are all about the same distance from the average front door, and the hospital is a long way further.
The buses are frequent today, not just on old timetables. The average stop has about 254 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 15 buses in the peak hour, and every one of the 141 stops with service data has weekend buses. Those are counts of departures, not routes, and at about 15 an hour in the peak, most people turn up without checking the timetable.
Gigabit broadband is available to about 92% of Barkingside's premises, and superfast to about 99%, with no premises below the minimum speed everyone is legally entitled to request. Every postcode has 4G or 5G from at least one network, and nearly all have every network. For the third of workers based at home, the connection is reliable enough.
Road noise is the cost of all that traffic. Every Barkingside postcode is at or near 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise does not reach that level anywhere in the area. The mapping covers postcodes, so check the specific house on the government's road noise map, especially if it backs onto one of the main roads.
There are 10 public charge points in the area, with 22 connectors between them, and 6 of the chargers are rapid. With rapid chargers in the area, an electric car can be topped up while doing the shopping, without needing to plan around it.
Barkingside is better connected than average, with frequent buses, fast broadband and short journeys to everyday places. The Tube line is there, but most residents get to work by car or from home.