Badly, unless you count the driveway. About half of working residents drive to work. Four in ten don't commute at all. Hardly anyone takes the train or the bus. Crawley Down is connected by car and by broadband, and not much else.
Crawley Down has no station of its own. The nearest options include East Grinstead, Three Bridges and Gatwick Airport, with Horley, Lingfield and Dormans further round, and every one of them needs a car or a bus to reach. At the 2021 census, about 2% of working residents commuted by train and about 1% by bus, from a village with 26 bus stops. When a station is a drive away, most people who have already got in the car keep driving.
The same census shows how the village gets to work. About 49% of working residents drove and about 40% worked from home. Only about 3% walked. Just 8% of households have no car, and about 56% have two or more. The second car is how most households here get about.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, modelled for the area rather than from any particular front door, put the nearest town centre about 16 minutes away by car. By public transport it takes about 31 minutes, by bike about 29 and on foot about 64. A walk of more than an hour means nobody walks into town.
The same statistics cover everyday trips. A GP is about 8 minutes by car, 11 by public transport or 16 on foot. A food store is about 7 minutes by car or 13 on foot, so the pint of milk is walkable. The nearest hospital is about 29 minutes by car and 53 by public transport. The nearest large employment centre is about 13 minutes by car and 21 by public transport. All of these date from 2019. The car and walking times will hold, but bus services have been cut in many places since, so treat the public transport figures more cautiously.
The current bus timetable is better than you might expect. Each of the 26 stops averages about 44 departures on a weekday, around two an hour at peak, and every stop has some weekend service. That is a real bus service, not a token one. It still hasn't persuaded more than about 1% of commuters out of their cars.
Broadband is patchy. Superfast speeds reach about 99% of premises and none falls below the legal minimum, but gigabit and ultrafast connections are available to only about 42%. For a village where so many people work from home, that gap depends on which side of the cabinet your house is on.
Mobile coverage is solid. Every part of the village gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and about 98% gets it from all of them.
Official noise mapping treats road noise of 65 decibels or more as significant, and every postcode in Crawley Down, 100%, is near or above that level, with the loudest band reaching 75 decibels. That is a mapping measure for the postcode, not a prediction of what you will hear in a given bedroom, but it is worth a visit at rush hour before an offer. Rail noise doesn't register at all, which is the one benefit of having no railway.
For electric cars, the area has one public charge point with one connector, and none of it is rapid. That means charging happens on your own driveway, and a household without one would have to plan every charge.
For a typical working week, the maths is simple: the car does the commute, the router does the office, and the bus is the backup. Anyone relying on a train will be driving to it first.
Connectivity is Crawley Down's weak point. The village works well for households with two cars and a home office, and poorly for anyone who wants to leave the car behind.