Canning Town is very well connected, and it runs on buses more than on anything else. The typical stop is busy all day and still busy on Sunday. More than half of households have no car. The broadband is fast nearly everywhere. Getting out is easy. Getting a quiet night beside the main road is a lot harder.
At the 2021 Census, about 7% of working residents went to work by train and 6% by bus. Stratford and West Ham are the rail stations on the doorstep for anyone heading further afield. Most of the work is done by the 393 bus stops in the area, along with the bus station at Canning Town and a second one at Prince Regent.
At the same Census, about 38% of working residents worked from home, which is the biggest share of any option, and 15% drove. Only 4% walked to work and 2% cycled. About 55% of households own no car and only about 8% own more than one. Canning Town is a place where nearly two in five work from home and, of the people who do travel, most leave the car behind.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which date from 2019, put the nearest town centre about 9 minutes away by car, 14 by public transport, 11 by bike and 17 on foot. A town centre about a quarter of an hour's walk away is about as close as a flat in the middle of a big city gets.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 85% of premises and superfast about 97%, and no premises in the area fall below the legal minimum speed. Every postcode gets a 4G or 5G signal from every network.
Canning Town has 57 public charging points with 86 connectors between them, and 7 of those points are rapid. With only seven rapid chargers, most electric-car owners here will be planning their charging around the slower points.
For a commute, Canning Town works best for someone heading into central or east London by bus or rail without needing a car. At the southern edge, North Woolwich adds the Woolwich Ferry and the foot tunnel under the Thames to Woolwich, which give the district a crossing that most of east London doesn't have.
The Department for Transport's modelled journeys to everyday places are short. A GP is about 7 minutes by car, 8 by public transport and 9 on foot. A food shop is about 8 minutes' walk or 7 by car. A hospital is about 11 minutes by car and 21 by public transport. The nearest large cluster of jobs is about 5 minutes by car and 12 by public transport. These are averages for the whole area. The distances don't change, but the public transport times were modelled in 2019 and some services have been cut since, so they are the least reliable figures in the set.
The current bus timetable is busier than any of those journey times suggest. Across the 304 stops with timetable data, the typical stop has about 395 departures on a weekday and about 21 buses in the peak hour, and every one of those stops has a weekend service. Nobody here needs to learn the timetable.
The price of all that traffic is noise. About 82% of postcodes are near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official noise mapping counts traffic noise as significant, and the loudest band in the area is 75 decibels and above. Rail noise is a separate source and reaches that level at only about 1% of postcodes. Parliament passed an Act to build the Barking Road across the marsh in 1809, and the traffic has kept coming ever since. If you're looking at a flat, go back at rush hour and stand in the bedroom with the window open, because the floor plan won't tell you which way the bedroom faces the road.
Canning Town's transport is one of its real strengths, and it comes as a package: plenty of buses, fast broadband and very little need for a car, with the traffic noise thrown in.