Well connected by car and by cable, less so by train. About a third work from home. About half drive. Hardly anyone takes the train, despite the town having three stations. In Farnborough the fastest commute is the broadband.
On paper the rail looks generous. Farnborough (Main), Farnborough North and North Camp all serve the town, with Frimley and Blackwater stations close by. The 2021 census found only about 2% of workers commuting by train. Local complaint has long been that the services are slow and awkward, and plenty of residents drive to a station with a faster train rather than use the nearest one. Buses do no better on the commute: 208 stops, but only about 2% of workers take a bus to work.
The biggest shares tell the story. About 49% of workers drove, and about 32% worked from home. Walking accounted for about 7% and cycling about 2%. Only about 14% of households have no car, while about 46% have two or more. Farnborough is a car town that happens to own a lot of railway.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics are modelled for the area as a whole, not from any particular front door. On that basis the nearest town centre is about 10 minutes by car, 14 by bike, 17 by public transport and 26 on foot. The public transport figures date from 2019, and services have been cut in places since, so give those more caution than the car and walking times.
Everyday errands are mostly short. A food shop is about 8 minutes' walk or 7 by car. A GP surgery is about 8 minutes by car, 12 by public transport or 14 on foot. Employment is about 14 minutes by car and, surprisingly, 9 by public transport, because the modelled journey counts the nearest jobs rather than your own. The hospital is the outlier: about 15 minutes by car and about 36 by public transport. Anyone without a car should think about that before the need arises.
The buses themselves are more than decorative. On current timetables the average stop sees about 138 departures on a weekday and about 8 an hour at peak, and about 76% of stops have some weekend service. That's a working network for getting around town, even if the commuters have mostly given up on it.
Broadband is the strongest part of the picture. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 91% of premises, ultrafast about 91% and superfast about 97%. For a town where a third of the workforce works from home, that is the infrastructure that counts. Mobile is equally dependable: 4G or 5G reaches 100% of the area from at least one operator and 100% from all of them, so switching networks won't find you a dead spot.
The cost of all that driving is noise. Official mapping treats 65 decibels as the point at which road noise becomes significant, and 100% of postcodes, once rounded, sit near or above that level somewhere nearby, with the loudest band reaching 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source: about 11% of postcodes sit near the 65-decibel mark from trains, peaking at 70 decibels. None of that predicts what a particular bedroom will hear, which is why the viewing should include a weekday rush hour.
For electric cars, there are 17 public charge points in the area with 39 connectors between them, 8 of them rapid. Eight rapid units means charging is something to plan for, not something done in passing while buying bread.
For a typical Farnborough household, the car handles the daily trips, the fibre handles the job, and the train is for the occasional London day out. That works as long as the car keeps working.
Farnborough is better connected than most towns its size by road and by broadband, and weaker than it should be on the train, given how many stations it has. Home workers and drivers will find it easy. Rail commuters will spend some of their time on the station car park.