Datchet is fairly well connected, better by train and broadband than its commuting habits suggest. It has its own railway station. Buses run often enough to be useful. Almost every home can get gigabit broadband. Most people still drive, and nearly as many have stopped commuting at all.
Datchet Rail Station is in the village, with Sunnymeads and Wraysbury stations close by and Windsor & Eton Riverside across the river. Even so, only about 3% of working residents took the train to work at the 2021 census. The area has 144 bus stops, and about 1% of workers used a bus to get to work. For a village with a platform in the middle of it, the trains carry remarkably few of its commuters.
The real commute splits two ways. About 45% of working residents in the Datchet area drove to work at the 2021 census and about 43% worked from home. Walking accounted for about 3% and cycling about 1%. About 9% of households have no car, and 55% have two or more. Datchet's commute is a choice between the driveway and the desk at home, and the station watches both.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics for 2019 put the nearest town centre about 13 minutes away by car, 26 minutes by public transport, 21 minutes by bike and 52 minutes on foot. That walk is the finding: the village has its shops, but the nearest town centre is a car journey for nearly everyone.
The same modelled statistics, which hold up well for fixed destinations by car and on foot but date from 2019 for public transport, since when services have been cut, put a GP about 10 minutes away by car, 18 minutes by public transport and 27 minutes on foot. A hospital is about 20 minutes by car and 49 minutes by public transport. A food store is about 9 minutes by car or a 24-minute walk. The nearest concentration of jobs is about 14 minutes by car and 12 minutes by public transport. That is the one journey on the list where the bus or train beats the car, and only about 4% of commuters use them.
The buses themselves are current figures. Of the stops with timetable data, the average sees about 73 scheduled departures on a weekday and about four an hour at peak, and every one of those 113 stops has some weekend service. That is a usable service, more than many villages get.
Broadband is the strongest link. About 89% of premises in the Datchet area can get gigabit broadband and about 97% superfast, with none below the legal minimum service level. Every postcode has 4G or 5G from every mobile network. For the 43% working from home, the cable is the commute.
Road noise reaches everywhere. Every postcode in the area is near or above the 65-decibel level at which official noise mapping treats road traffic as significant, and the loudest mapped band reaches 75 decibels or more. Rail noise registers in none of them. Check the exact address on the government's road noise maps, since the band can change from one end of a street to the other.
The area has six public charge points with 11 connectors between them, three of them rapid. With so few rapid units, charging an electric car here is something to plan around unless the charger is on your own drive.
For a typical working week, that means a car for most errands, a train that suits anyone heading somewhere on its line, and broadband good enough to skip the journey altogether. Datchet is better connected than most villages, held back by how little use its residents make of the parts that work.