Chatham is well connected, and most people still drive. Two main railway lines meet at the station. Superfast broadband reaches nearly every home. A fifth of households have no car. More than half of commuters drive anyway, and the traffic has noticed.
Chatham Rail Station is the interchange where the North Kent line meets the Chatham Main Line. It has direct services into London, including high-speed trains, and Rochester and Gillingham stations are a stop either side. Despite all that, only about 4% of working residents commute by train. There are 449 bus stops in the area, and about 3% of commuters use them.
The biggest commuting mode by some distance is the car. About 54% of working residents drive to work, about 24% work from home and about 7% walk. Cycling barely registers, at about 1%, which says something about the hills. A fifth of households have no car at all, while about 39% have two or more. The car-free households mostly aren't commuting by train either, so plenty of those journeys are walks to somewhere close.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre about 12 minutes away by car, 18 by bike, 25 by public transport and 37 on foot. Those figures are averaged for the area, not a route from any particular door. The walk is the telling number. From the suburbs up the hill, walking into the centre takes most of an hour's commitment, and nobody does it with shopping.
Everyday destinations come out closer. By the same statistics, a GP is about 8 minutes by car, 10 by public transport and 11 on foot, and a food shop is about 7 minutes whether you walk or drive. A hospital is about 14 minutes by car and 29 by public transport. Employment is about 20 minutes by car and 13 by public transport, one of the few measures where the bus beats the car on paper. All of these date from 2019, and bus services have been cut in plenty of places since then, so the public-transport times deserve more caution than the car and walking ones.
Today's timetables are thinner than the stop count suggests. The average stop sees about 24 scheduled departures on a weekday, but less than half a bus per stop in the peak hour. About 89% of stops with timetable data have some weekend service. There are plenty of stops, and fewer buses than stops would suggest.
Broadband is the strong suit. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 86% of premises, ultrafast about 90% and superfast about 98%, and no premises fall below the universal service minimum. Mobile coverage is equally complete: 4G or 5G from at least one operator reaches effectively every postcode, and from all operators almost the same. Working from home here isn't a gamble on signal.
The price of all this road use is noise. Almost 100% of postcodes sit near road noise at or above 65 decibels, the level official mapping treats as significant, and the loudest band present is 75 decibels and up. Rail noise is a separate source, and it touches only a small fraction of postcodes. None of this tells you how loud a particular bedroom will be, but it's a reason to view a house at rush hour as well as on Sunday morning.
Electric car owners have little to work with. The area has 4 public charge points with 8 connectors between them, and only 1 of them is rapid. With one rapid charger, a driver without a driveway plans each charge in advance.
Chatham is well connected, with the trains and broadband doing most of the work. What lets it down is how few residents use the railway on their doorstep.