Better than its size would suggest, in some directions and not others. Direct trains run to London, Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton and Gatwick Airport from the station in the city itself. About one and a half per cent of working residents commute by train. Four in five postcodes have gigabit broadband. Three in ten people work from home. More of a get-online cathedral city than a get-on-the-train one.
The rail network is the strongest pillar of the daily-commute story. Chichester Rail Station sits in the city, with Fishbourne Rail Station, Bosham Rail Station and Bognor Regis Rail Station filling out the line at the edges of the postcode area. Direct services run to London Victoria via Gatwick Airport, to Brighton, to Portsmouth and to Southampton. The train share of the work commute lands at about one and a half per cent, which sounds low until you remember that nearly thirty per cent of working residents now work from home and the typical commute is to a bedroom rather than a platform. Buses pick up around the same share at about one and a half per cent, with somewhere around two hundred and thirty stops scattered across the area. The bus is what gets residents into the centre for the shop, the appointment or the school run, rather than what carries people to the next county.
Broadband is the standout. Almost every postcode here has super-fast service, four in five have gigabit, and the share stuck below the universal-service standard is effectively zero. Mobile coverage is comparable: every postcode has at least one operator delivering modern data service, and nearly every postcode gets all of them. The household that needs to be online for work, school or both, in any reasonable spread of devices, will not be the household that loses an afternoon to the router.
Getting about, in practical terms, looks like this. The town centre is about nine minutes from a typical address by car, eleven by bicycle, sixteen by public transport, and nineteen on foot. About forty per cent of working residents drive to work, seventeen per cent walk, five per cent cycle, and the remainder splits between train, bus and the working-from-home headline. The motorway sits within reasonable reach for a car run east toward Brighton or west toward Portsmouth and Southampton, with the south-coast trunk routes carrying the through-traffic that the city itself does not. The Roman street plan in the centre is what it is, and parking inside the historic core costs what historic cores have always cost.
So: better connected than a cathedral city of this size has any right to be, on the broadband and on the rail map, and average-to-decent on the rest. The train is the option you have rather than the option you take daily. The broadband is the option that actually shapes the working day. The car is the answer to the gap between the two. Decent at most of it, exceptional at the wires.