Charlton is well connected, mostly by bus and by not travelling at all. About four in ten workers stay home. Buses run all day and every weekend. Most homes can get gigabit broadband. The trains are there for the minority who still commute by rail.
Charlton Rail Station is the local stop, with Westcombe Park one stop towards town and Woolwich Dockyard one stop out, and Maze Hill and Woolwich Arsenal not much further. Only about 8% of Charlton's workers took the train at the 2021 Census. About 11% took the bus, using a network of 86 stops across the area.
Most people's commute is shorter than that. About 40% of Charlton's workers were working from home at the Census, about 18% drove, about 6% walked and about 2% cycled. About 43% of households have no car, while about 13% run two or more. Two households on the same road can have completely different ideas of what a journey into town involves.
The nearest town centre is about 8 minutes by car, about 14 by public transport, about 11 by bike and about 18 on foot, on the Department for Transport's modelled journey times for the area. Eighteen minutes on foot is long enough that most people get the bus.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 80% of Charlton's premises, ultrafast the same 80%, and superfast about 98%, with nobody below the legal minimum, and every postcode gets 4G or 5G on every network. For a neighbourhood where four in ten work from home, that matters more than the train timetable.
Day to day, the neighbourhood is set up for short hops. The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics put a doctor's surgery about 8 minutes away by car, 11 on foot and 10 by public transport, a hospital about 10 minutes by car and 21 by public transport, a food store about 6 minutes on foot or by car, and a centre of employment about 12 minutes by car and 10 by public transport. These are modelled averages for the area, and while the distances do not change, the public transport times date from 2019 and some services have been cut since, so they are the least reliable of the set. Getting to work by bus is faster than driving, which tells you what the traffic on Woolwich Road is like.
The bus figures are current, and they are good. The stops with timetable data average about 500 scheduled weekday departures each, about 27 buses in the peak hour, and every one of them has a weekend service. That is enough buses that nobody needs to check the timetable.
The cost is noise. About 100% of Charlton's postcodes are near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official noise mapping treats traffic as significant, and the loudest band reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source, and about 21% of postcodes are near or above 65 decibels from trains, up to a maximum of 65. Visit a shortlisted house at rush hour with the windows open, because the maps cannot tell you what a particular bedroom will sound like. The only places in Charlton without a postcode on the noise map are the parks.
There are 38 public charge points in the area with 82 connectors between them, five of them rapid. With so few rapid units, charging is something most drivers here plan for.
Charlton is better connected than average. Buses and broadband do most of the work, and trains and cars are a smaller part of how people get about.