Chislehurst is very well connected, and half of it barely needs to be. Trains run into central London from more than one local station. The buses are frequent and run all weekend. Gigabit broadband reaches almost every home. Plenty of residents never commute at all.
Chislehurst station has trains to Charing Cross, Cannon Street and London Bridge via Lewisham, and Elmstead Woods, Bickley and Petts Wood stations are all close enough to be somebody's nearest. Even so, only about 9% of working residents took the train to work at the 2021 census. There are 209 bus stops in and around the area, though only about 3% of workers used a bus to get to work. A buyer can choose between several stations, and most residents use none of them.
What residents actually did, at that 2021 census, was stay at home, with about 53% working from home. Another 27% drove, about 3% walked and 1% cycled. Around 15% of households have no car and 38% have two or more. The trains get the attention, but for many households the drive and the home office do most of the travelling.
On the Department for Transport's 2019 journey-time model, the nearest town centre is about 10 minutes away by car, 14 by public transport, 11 by bike and 17 on foot. These are modelled averages for the area, not timings for any particular front door. Within that, the bus does well against the car, which is unusual for outer London.
From the same Department for Transport modelling, a GP is about 8 minutes by car, 13 by public transport or 15 on foot, and a food shop about 10 minutes' walk or 7 minutes' drive. The nearest hospital is about 20 minutes by car and 39 by public transport, and walking takes about 82 minutes. A large employment centre is about 14 minutes by car, 13 by public transport and 6 by bike. The distances in those figures won't have changed, but the public transport times date from 2019 and bus timetables have shifted since, so those are the least reliable numbers here. It is still a long way to hospital if you aren't in a car.
The buses are the strongest part of the network. Each stop averages about 221 scheduled departures on a weekday, around 12 an hour at peak, and 196 of the 197 stops with timetable data have some weekend service. That counts departures and not routes, and it adds up to a proper service. It's better than many outer London suburbs manage.
Gigabit broadband is available to about 91% of premises and superfast to about 98%, and no postcode falls below the universal service minimum. Mobile coverage is complete in practice, with every network reaching nearly every postcode. For a place where half the workforce works from the house, that matters more than the trains.
There are 14 public charge points in and around Chislehurst, with 27 connectors between them, and one of them is rapid. With a single rapid unit, most drivers will charge at home overnight and plan around that.
Road noise is the cost of all those connections. Nearly every postcode in the area is near or above 65 decibels on the official road-noise mapping, the level it treats as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels or more. Rail noise is a separate measure, with about 11% of postcodes near or above the same threshold. Both maps show postcodes, not individual houses. Take a quiet-sounding street on trust only after standing on it at rush hour.
Connections are one of Chislehurst's real strengths. Between frequent buses, several stations and fast broadband, the main limit on getting around is the traffic.