The City of London has some of the best transport links in the country, and its residents hardly use them. Big rail terminals ring the Square Mile. Buses are frequent all week. Most households have no car. Most working residents don't commute at all. They've bought a flat in a station concourse and mostly stay put.
On rail, London Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Cannon Street, Fenchurch Street, London Blackfriars, City Thameslink and Farringdon all serve the City, and the Elizabeth line runs east to west beneath it. Even so, only about 2% of working residents took the train to work at the 2021 census. There are 332 bus stops in and around the area, and about 3% of residents went to work by bus.
The commute mix explains why. At the 2021 census, 66% of working residents worked from home and about 14% walked, compared with about 3% who cycled and about 3% who drove. About 79% of households have no car, and about 4% have two or more. In the Square Mile, a car is mostly a way of paying the congestion charge.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre about 10 minutes away by car, 13 by bike, 20 by public transport and 26 on foot. In a district this compact, a town-centre measure designed for market towns doesn't fit very well, since most residents already live inside a town centre.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 87% of premises, the same share as ultrafast and superfast, and none are below the universal service minimum. All four mobile networks cover the area completely with 4G or 5G.
There are 53 public charge points in and around the City, with 82 connectors between them, and just 1 is rapid. With almost no residents driving, that probably doesn't bother many people.
For a typical resident, getting about means walking, and the rail network is there for trips out of town. The trains are there when needed, but most days nobody living here needs them.
The same Department for Transport statistics, modelled for the City and dated 2019, put a GP about 7 minutes away whether you walk, drive or take public transport. A hospital is about 9 minutes by car and 13 by public transport. A food shop is about 3 minutes on foot and 6 by car. Employment is about 7 minutes by car and 6 by public transport. Distances to fixed places don't change much, but the public transport times are seven years old and services may have been cut since, so those are the softest figures in the set. A three-minute walk to food is the City's version of a corner shop, so long as dinner can be a meal deal.
The bus timetable shows real service. Stops with timetable data average about 792 scheduled departures each on a weekday and about 43 an hour at peak, and about 96% of them run at weekends. Those are current figures, unlike the 2019 journey times, and they count departures, not separate routes.
Traffic noise is the cost of all this. About 80% of the City's postcodes are near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band mapped reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is almost absent from the mapping, mostly because so much of the City's railway is underground. With that much of the City near the threshold, check which street a flat's bedroom faces, because a front bedroom on a main road and a back bedroom over a courtyard can be very different places to sleep.
The City is well connected for anyone who needs to travel and better than that for anyone who doesn't. Its residents rarely use the stations, the buses or the roads, and the noise is the part of the network they live with every day.