Ealing is well connected, though few of its residents spend the morning using the connections. It has trains in several directions and buses that come constantly. Half of working residents told the census they worked from home. Broadband reaches nearly every door. The other cost of the connections is that almost every street is next to a loud road.
Ealing Broadway is the main station, with the Elizabeth line, the Central line and the District line, and West Ealing is on the Elizabeth line too. Drayton Green and Castle Bar Park serve the branch line to the north. Even so, at the 2021 Census only about 2% of working residents took the train to work, and about 5% took the bus, from a district with 180 bus stops. That census was taken during the pandemic, when most commuting had stopped.
The real commute mix is led by the house itself. About 52% of working residents worked from home at the 2021 Census, about 16% drove, about 5% walked and about 3% cycled. More than a third of households, about 37%, have no car at all, and about 16% have two or more. A district with that many stations ended up, on census day, mostly working from home, and that figure is from a pandemic year.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre about 9 minutes away by car, 16 by public transport, 11 by bike and 19 on foot. For most of Ealing, the town centre is a short walk, with a car a little quicker if you can park.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 90% of premises, superfast about 99%, and no premises fall below the legal minimum. Every postcode gets 4G or 5G from every network. Ealing's internet is in better shape than its pavements are quiet.
The same Department for Transport statistics put a GP about 7 minutes away by car, 8 on foot and 8 by public transport, and a food shop about 7 minutes away whether you walk or drive. A hospital is about 15 minutes by car and 29 by public transport, and the nearest employment centre about 9 minutes by car and 14 by public transport. These are modelled averages for the whole area, and the public-transport times come from 2019 and have not been updated since, so they are the shakiest of the set. On these figures, Ealing gets everyday errands done within about a quarter of an hour.
The buses are a real service. Each stop averages about 373 scheduled departures on a weekday and roughly 19 buses in the peak hour, and every stop has a weekend service. In Ealing, nobody needs to learn the timetable.
The cost is noise. About 99% of Ealing's postcodes are near a road at or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. The North Circular cuts across the east of the district and the motorway runs close by to the south. Railway noise is a separate source, with about 18% of postcodes near tracks loud enough to cross that 65-decibel line. Check the official noise map for the exact address, because these are postcode-level bands and say nothing about any particular bedroom.
Ealing has 89 public charge points with 188 connectors between them, and 7 of those are rapid. Most electric-car owners here will need to plan their charging, since only those seven can charge a car while the driver does the shopping.
For a commuter, almost every part of central London is reachable by train, the buses fill in the rest, and a car is optional for more than a third of households. Ealing is one of the better-connected places to live, provided the sound of the traffic that comes with it does not bother you.