Badly, and there is no polite way to dress it. There is no train. Half the working population drives, and nearly a third does not leave the house at all. The nearest town centre is over half an hour away by car and the best part of an hour by public transport. Everything else about living here is negotiable; the distance is not.
Rail simply is not a category. The share of residents commuting by train is 0%, which is what happens when the passenger service that once served the town stopped in 1966 and nothing replaced it. Buses exist in the sense that 11 stops sit within the area, but the share commuting by bus rounds to nothing at about 0%. Anyone arriving from a city and expecting the bus to be a fallback should recalibrate now rather than in February.
The 2021 census shows how people actually get to work here, and it is a two-answer question. About 49% drive and roughly 30% work from home, which between them account for most of the working population. Walking takes about 16%, which is respectable for a town where the shops and the school are within a few streets, and cycling manages about 2% on roads that go uphill in every direction. Around 40% of households run two or more cars, and about 17% have none at all, a split that tells you there are two different lives being lived here: the one with a driveway and the one arranged entirely inside the town boundary.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre at about 35 minutes by car and 54 minutes by public transport. By bicycle it is roughly 81 minutes, and on foot the model tops out at its two-hour ceiling, which is the polite statistical way of saying you are not walking it. These are modelled figures for the area rather than a route from any particular door, and the public transport numbers date from 2019, so they describe services as they were rather than as they are.
The same statistics cover everyday destinations, and this is where the town does better than its reputation. A general practitioner surgery is about 9 minutes by car, 25 on foot and 17 by public transport. A food store is roughly 8 minutes by car and 18 on foot, which is the single most important number on this page for anyone without a car. Employment centres sit at about 26 minutes by car against 52 by public transport. A hospital is around 57 minutes by car and hits the two-hour modelled ceiling by public transport, and that gap is worth sitting with before anyone moves here at an age where hospitals become a recurring appointment.
Bus stops are not the same as a bus service, so the current timetable data matters more than the stop count. Across the 10 stops with published service information, weekday departures average about 12 per stop, and every one of those 10 carries some weekend service, which is genuinely more than many Exmoor settlements manage. The number that decides the argument is peak-hour departures, which average zero. A bus that runs through the middle of the day is a shopping service, not a commute.
Broadband is the one line where the town holds its own. Superfast reaches about 98% of premises and nothing sits below the universal service obligation, so working from home is a real option rather than a brave one. Gigabit, on the other hand, reaches about 1%, so anyone whose job depends on moving large files at speed should check the specific address rather than the town. Mobile is fine: roughly 100% of the area gets a fourth or fifth generation signal from at least one operator, and about 97% from all of them.
Road noise is a curiosity here. All of the area's postcodes sit near or above the 65-decibel threshold at which official noise mapping treats road traffic as significant, with the loudest modelled band reaching 75 decibels. That is the price of a valley town where one route carries everything, and the mapping cannot tell you how it will sound from any particular bedroom. Rail noise is not a factor at all, for reasons already covered.
For electric cars, the area has one public charge point with two connectors, one of which is rapid. That makes charging something you plan around rather than something you do while buying milk, and it puts the weight on having a driveway and a home charger.
Getting anywhere is the worst thing about Dulverton by a distance, and it is not a fixable weakness. The town works beautifully at walking pace and stops working the moment you need to be somewhere else on a schedule.