Cam is well connected by car and by broadband, and weakly by everything else. Nearly six in ten workers drive. Three in ten work from home. Gigabit broadband reaches most homes. Trains and buses get the leftovers, and that leaves the overall picture somewhere in the middle.
There are two stations in reach, Cam & Dursley and Stonehouse, and under 1% of working residents commute by train. Buses do little better. Cam has 83 bus stops, and about 1% of workers take a bus to work.
Driving and working from home account for most commutes. At the 2021 Census, about 57% of workers drove, about 30% worked from home, about 5% walked and about 1% cycled. Half of all households have two or more cars, and only about 12% have none. Cam's commute is mostly a car journey or a morning at home.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times from 2019 put the nearest town centre about 11 minutes away by car, 18 by bike, 22 by public transport and 41 on foot. A walk of forty minutes each way is a hike, so in practice the town centre is somewhere people drive to.
Other everyday trips follow the same pattern, again from the Department for Transport's modelled averages for the area. Distances to fixed places like a surgery or a hospital barely change, but the public transport times date from 2019 and bus services have been cut since, so they are the weakest of the set. A GP is about 10 minutes by car, 20 by public transport and 35 on foot. A food shop is about 8 minutes by car or 18 on foot. Somewhere offering a decent number of jobs is about 16 minutes by car or 25 by public transport. Hospital is the long one: about 34 minutes by car and 71 by public transport. Anyone who doesn't drive should plan a hospital appointment as a morning's outing.
The buses run, though rarely. Across the 71 stops with timetable data, the average stop sees about nine departures on a weekday and about 0.3 in the peak hour. About 92% of stops have some weekend service. A third of a bus in the rush hour won't get many people to work.
Broadband is the strong part of the picture. Gigabit broadband reaches about 86% of premises and superfast about 98%. Every part of Cam gets a 4G or 5G signal from at least one network, and about 94% gets it from all of them. For the three in ten who work from home, the fibre counts for more than the timetable.
Road and rail noise both appear on the official noise maps, which treat 65 decibels as the point where noise becomes significant. Almost every postcode in Cam, about 100%, is near a mapped road-noise area at or above that level, and the loudest road band present is 75 decibels. Rail noise is measured separately: again about 100% of postcodes are near a mapped rail area at or above 65 decibels, and the loudest rail band is 70. Those maps show where the noise lies, not what a given bedroom hears. Look the house up on the government's strategic noise maps to see which contour it falls in and whether the noise comes from the road or the railway.
Charging an electric car takes planning. Cam has two public charge points with three connectors between them, and none of them is rapid. Charging happens on the driveway at home, or as a separate trip.
Cam is fine for a household with cars and a fibre line, and hard work without them. With two stations close by that hardly anyone commutes from, the connections are middling.