Coleford is well connected by fibre and badly connected by everything else. There's no station. Buses come by about once an hour at best. Six in ten drive to work. The broadband is better than the bus timetable deserves.
No railway station appears among Coleford's local places, and under 1% of working residents commute by train. Buses carry about 2% of commuters, despite 49 bus stops across the area. The railway line from Parkend arrived in 1875 and its track was gone by 1971, and the town has driven ever since.
The commute is mostly a car. About 60% of working residents drive to work, about 21% work from home, about 8% walk and about 1% cycle. About 39% of households run two or more cars, and about a fifth have none. A fifth of households without a car, in a town where the bus barely registers as a way to get to work, have mostly built their lives within walking distance.
Around town, the distances are short. On the Department for Transport's modelled journey times, the nearest town centre is about 7 minutes by car, 8 by bike, 9 by public transport and 10 on foot, so for anyone living in Coleford the centre is a walk.
The everyday destinations are close too, until the hospital. The same Department for Transport statistics are modelled averages for the area, and their public transport times date from 2019, so services cut since then aren't reflected and those times are the shakiest in the set. They put a doctor's surgery about 7 minutes away by car and 12 minutes on foot or by public transport, and a food shop about 8 minutes' walk or 7 by car. Employment is about 7 minutes by car and about 49 by public transport. The nearest hospital is about 53 minutes by car and nearly two hours by public transport. A job that's a seven-minute drive away and a forty-nine-minute bus ride away explains the commute figures on its own.
The buses themselves are thin. Among the 32 stops with timetable data, the average is about 15 scheduled departures each on a weekday and fewer than one an hour at peak, although about 91% of them have some service at the weekend. A bus at peak arrives slightly less often than once an hour, so anyone using it plans the day around the timetable.
Broadband is where Coleford suddenly looks modern. About 94% of premises can get gigabit, all of them can get superfast, and none fall below the legal minimum service. Mobile coverage matches, with almost every part of the area getting 4G or 5G from at least one network and about 93% getting it from every operator. Anyone working from home here has the connection for it, and only a car for the occasional trip to the office.
Road noise reaches every postcode in Coleford. All of them are near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping counts road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. With the trains long gone, rail noise registers nowhere. The useful check is a visit to the specific house at rush hour, because a town-wide noise band can't tell a cul-de-sac from a frontage on the through-road.
Electric charging is sparse. The area has 4 public charge points with 6 connectors between them, and one of them is rapid. With a single rapid charger, a top-up has to be planned ahead.
Coleford's connections are middling at best. The fibre and the short local drives are genuinely good, but without a car the town is a long way from a hospital, a job or a train.