Brockenhurst is better connected than a village buried this deep in a forest has any right to be, and then almost nobody uses the connection. It has its own mainline station with direct trains to London and along the coast. Yet only about one worker in forty actually commutes by rail. Nearly half the working population does the job from home instead. The infrastructure says commuter hub. The behaviour says nobody's leaving.
The rail line is the genuine asset. Brockenhurst Rail Station sits on the main line and runs direct trains to London one way and to the coastal towns the other, which is a level of service most villages of a few thousand people can only envy. The catch is in the usage: the share of residents commuting by train comes in at roughly 2.4%, so a station built to move crowds mostly moves a trickle. Buses barely register at all. There are around twenty-two bus stops scattered across the area, but the proportion of people commuting by bus rounds to about one in a thousand, which is another way of saying the timetable exists more in theory than in anyone's daily routine.
Where Brockenhurst does quietly deliver is the connection that does not involve leaving the sofa. Gigabit-capable broadband reaches around 95% of the village, so the half of the workforce logging in from a spare bedroom has the line speed to make it work. In a place where the train is superb and largely ignored, the broadband is doing the heavy lifting for how people actually earn a living.
Put it together and the real picture is a car-and-keyboard village rather than a public-transport one. Close to half work from home, about a third drive to work, and more than half of households keep two cars or more, which tells you what people fall back on when the bus is a fiction and the train serves a purpose only a few times a week. The nearest town centre is roughly a quarter of an hour away by car. For genuine daily reliance, the vehicle on the drive matters more than the platform down the road.
The blunt verdict is that Brockenhurst rates as middling for connectivity, around two and a half out of five, and that average hides a strange split. One superb train line, one excellent broadband network, and almost everything else leaning on a car. Buy here for the rail link if you like, but be honest that you will probably use the forest more than the timetable.