Bray is well placed for getting about and poorly served by public transport. The nearest station is in the next town. The village has just two bus stops. More than half the workforce stays at home. Not one home can get gigabit broadband. Bray works for people who drive, and for people who rarely need to go anywhere.
The trains run from Maidenhead Rail Station in Maidenhead town centre, with Taplow as the other option nearby. At the 2021 Census about 1% of Bray's working residents took the train to work. Buses carried fewer than one in a hundred, and Bray has just two bus stops between them. For most people in Bray, getting to a train means driving into Maidenhead first.
The commute mix is mostly people who don't commute. The 2021 Census recorded 58% of working residents working mainly from home, 33% driving and 4% walking. Cycling barely registered. About 48% of households own two or more cars, and about 12% have none. With one bus an hour at peak, almost nobody uses the bus to get to work.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre about 11 minutes away by car, 15 by bike, 20 by public transport and 33 on foot. For everyday trips, a GP surgery is about 10 minutes by car, 25 by public transport and 33 on foot. A food shop is about 8 minutes by car or 11 on foot, and the nearest large cluster of jobs about 9 minutes by car or 10 by public transport. A hospital is about 26 minutes by car and about 57 by public transport. All of these are 2019 averages for the area. The distances haven't moved since, but bus and train services have been cut, so the public transport times are the least trustworthy of the set. A walk of more than half an hour to the GP makes the car the default for most errands.
Bus timetables are current, unlike the modelled times. Each of Bray's two stops gets about 16 scheduled departures on a weekday, roughly one an hour at peak, and both stops have some weekend service. Sixteen departures a stop is a bus to plan your day around, not one you just turn up for.
Broadband is the strangest gap for a village where most people work from home. Superfast broadband reaches every postcode and ultrafast reaches 21%, but gigabit reaches none. No postcode falls below the legal minimum, but no postcode gets the top speed either. Put the exact address into the main providers' availability checkers. The postcode figures cover the whole village, and the one fast line in Bray may not run to the house you are buying.
Mobile coverage is complete. All of Bray's postcodes get 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and all of them from every operator.
Road noise reaches every part of the village. Every Bray postcode is near traffic noise of 65 decibels or more, which is the level official noise mapping treats as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise doesn't reach that threshold anywhere. How much of the road noise you hear indoors depends on the house, its glazing and which way it faces. A village that sells itself on the river has the road as its background noise.
Bray is poorly connected for anyone without a car, with a borrowed station, a thin bus service and no gigabit broadband. Drivers who work from home will cope fine, and everyone else will find it hard work.