Exeter is well connected, and hardly anyone commutes by train. About a quarter of households run no car at all. Roughly a third work from home. Nearly one in six walks to work. The connections that matter in this city are the short ones, and the mainline station is mostly for leaving.
The rail network is genuinely dense for a city this size. Exeter St Davids, Exeter Central and Exeter St Thomas sit inside the city itself, with a ring of suburban halts around them at Polsloe Bridge, St James Park, Pinhoe, Digby and Sowton, Newcourt, Marsh Barton and Topsham, and Exton and Cranbrook further out. Despite all of that, only about 1% of working residents commute by train. Roughly 5% take the bus, from 664 bus stops across the area. The infrastructure is there and the commuting habit never formed around it.
What people actually do is stay put or walk. About 31% work from home, roughly 37% drive, around 16% walk and about 5% cycle. Around 25% of households have no car and roughly 30% have two or more, which is a city split cleanly between people who never needed one and people who have a spare. That combination, high home-working and high walking, describes somewhere compact enough that the car is a weekend object for a large slice of the population.
On the Department for Transport's modelled journey times, the nearest town centre is about 10 minutes by car, roughly 17 minutes by public transport, around 14 minutes by bicycle and about 29 minutes on foot. Those are modelled for the area as a whole rather than a route from any particular front door, and they date from 2019, so the public transport ones should be read with more caution than the car and walking times as services have changed since.
The same statistics put a food store about 7 minutes away on foot and roughly 7 minutes by car, which is the rare case where walking wins outright and the car is pure theatre. A doctor's surgery is around 8 minutes by car, about 10 by public transport and roughly 12 on foot. A hospital is about 12 minutes by car and around 30 by public transport, which is the widest gap in the set. Employment centres run to roughly 10 minutes by public transport against about 17 by car, an inversion you almost never see and one that suggests the buses go where the jobs are even if commuters have decided otherwise.
Bus provision is real rather than nominal, and this is current rather than modelled. Of the 664 stops, 626 carry service data, averaging 122 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 8 buses an hour at peak. Around 98% of stops see some weekend service. A stop with two departures a day is not a bus service. These are.
Broadband is strong. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 88% of premises, ultrafast the same, and superfast around 96%. No premises in the area fall below the universal service obligation, which removes the single worst outcome for anyone working from home in a city where a third of workers do exactly that.
Mobile coverage is complete: every part of the area has fourth or fifth generation service from at least one operator, and from all operators, so the network on your existing contract is not a variable here. For electric vehicles, there are 63 public charge points in the area offering 153 connections in total, of which 9 are rapid. Nine rapid units across a city means charging is mostly something you plan around rather than something you finish during a supermarket trip.
Noise is the cost of all this proximity. Roughly 100% of Exeter postcodes sit near or above the 65-decibel contour, the level at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, with the loudest band present reaching 75 decibels and above. Rail noise is mapped separately and reaches about 91% of postcodes near the same threshold, topping out at 70 decibels. Those are area-wide contour measurements rather than a prediction about any individual house, and a quiet back bedroom on a mapped street is entirely possible.
Connectivity comes out above average, carried by the buses, the broadband and how little distance there is to cover. The weak spot is rail commuting, which the city is equipped for and has collectively declined to do.