Well connected for staying put, less so for leaving. Three railway stations sit inside the town. Hardly anyone uses them to get to work. Fast broadband reaches every door. Bexhill is wired better than it is railed.
The railway gives Bexhill more stations than most towns its size: Bexhill itself, Collington and Cooden Beach, with Crowhurst, Normans Bay, West St Leonards and St Leonards Warrior Square close by. At the 2021 Census only about 3% of working residents took the train to work. Buses carried about 1%, despite 239 bus stops across the town. The infrastructure is there. The commuters mostly aren't.
The real commute mix is the car and the spare room. About 51% of working residents drove to work, and about 27% worked from home, which makes the kitchen table the second-busiest route in town. Walking took about 10% and cycling about 1%. About 21% of households have no car, and about 33% have two or more, so the town splits into people who walk to the shops and people whose driveway is a car park.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which describe the area as a whole rather than a route from any one door, put the nearest town centre about 9 minutes away by car, 13 by bike, 17 by public transport and 25 on foot. A GP is about 8 minutes by car, 12 by public transport and 14 on foot. A food shop is about 7 minutes by car and 9 minutes' walk, which is the kind of number that decides whether you ever bother to drive for milk. The hospital is the outlier: about 21 minutes by car and about 50 by public transport. A large employment centre sits about 18 minutes away by car and 50 by public transport. Those public transport figures date from 2019, and services change, so they deserve more caution than the car and walking times.
The bus service is better than its commuting share suggests. Stops with timetable data average about 63 scheduled departures each on a weekday, with around 4 an hour at peak, and every one of those stops has some weekend service. That is a working bus network, used mainly by people who aren't going to work.
Broadband is the strongest part of the story. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 82% of premises, superfast broadband reaches all of them, and no premises fall below the legal minimum service. For the quarter of residents working from home, that matters more than the train timetable.
Mobile coverage is near complete. Every postcode gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and about 98% get it from all of them.
Road noise is the price of a town built along the coast road. About 56% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level official noise mapping treats as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels or more. That describes the postcode, not the sound inside any given house, but anyone buying on a main road should listen before they sign. Rail noise registers at no postcodes at that level.
Electric car owners should plan ahead. There are 3 public charge points in the area, with 4 connectors between them, and only 1 of them is rapid. Charging here is something you do at home or schedule, not something you fit in while buying bread.
In practice, a typical commute from Bexhill means the car or no commute at all. The stations serve occasional trips, the buses serve the town, and the broadband serves the people who have stopped travelling to work.
Bexhill-on-Sea is somewhat better connected than average, carried by excellent broadband and a solid local bus service rather than by the rail links it has on paper. For daily travel beyond the town, the car still wins.