Not very, and the town has organised its life around that fact rather than fighting it. There is no station in the town. Half the working residents drive to work, and four in ten never leave the house to do it. More than half of households run two cars or more. Connectivity here is a thing you own rather than a thing you catch.
The railway is close without being convenient. Eggesford, Kings Nympton, Lapford, Copplestone, Morchard Road, Portsmouth Arms and Umberleigh all sit on the valley line, each a drive away, and under 1% of working residents commute by train. There are 70 bus stops across the area and under 1% commute by bus, which tells you how those stops are actually used.
The commute mix is the honest description of the place. Census 2021 puts 51% of working residents driving to work and 39% working from home, with 5% walking and under 1% cycling. Only 8% of households have no car at all, while 55% have two or more. A place where two in five people work from a spare bedroom and most of the rest drive is not a place with a transport problem. It is a place that solved the transport problem privately, one driveway at a time.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre at 25 minutes by car, 73 minutes by public transport, 54 minutes by bicycle and 116 minutes on foot. Those are modelled averages for the area rather than a route from any particular front door, and the walking figure is not a quirk of the model: a near two-hour walk to the nearest town centre is the finding, not a footnote to it.
The same modelling puts a general practice at 15 minutes by car, 50 by public transport and 73 on foot. A hospital is 44 minutes by car and 104 by public transport. A food store is 11 minutes by car and 45 on foot. Employment centres are 41 minutes by public transport and 57 by car, which is the one figure where the bus and train look competitive, and it is competitive because the driving comparison is itself long. One caution applies throughout: these journey times date from 2019, and while distances to fixed destinations do not move, rural bus services have been withdrawn in the years since, so the public transport figures deserve more scepticism than the car and walk times.
Current service data sharpens that. Across the 61 stops with published timetables, the average is 7 scheduled departures on a weekday, with an average of no buses at all in the peak hour, and 41% of stops have any weekend service. Seven departures spread across a day is a lifeline for people without a car rather than a commuting option, and a stop with no peak-hour bus is a stop that cannot get anyone to work.
Broadband is the other constraint, and it is a real one. Gigabit and ultrafast connections reach 22% of premises, superfast reaches 44%, and 6% of premises sit below the universal service obligation, meaning they cannot get a decent connection at all. In an area where 39% of workers do their job from home, the households on the wrong side of that split are the ones who will notice hardest. Mobile is the better news, with at least one operator delivering 4G or 5G at virtually every premises and all operators covering 95%.
Noise, at least, is not a trade-off here. None of the area's postcodes sit near the 65-decibel threshold at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, and none sit near it for railway noise either.
Electric vehicles are a scheduling exercise rather than a convenience. There are 3 public charge points in the area, offering 5 connectors between them, and none of them are rapid. Charging is something you plan overnight at home, not something you do while picking up a loaf.
Connectivity is the weakest thing about this area by a distance, and everything else it offers is quietly funded by that weakness. The quiet, the space and the low crime are all downstream of being awkward to reach, and a household that cannot run two cars will feel the arrangement in the first fortnight.