Badly, and the town has made its peace with that. There is a railway line, but it carries china clay rather than passengers. Almost nobody here commutes by train. Roughly a third of working residents have solved the problem by not commuting at all. Fowey is beautifully placed for a boat and awkwardly placed for everything else, which is the trade the whole town runs on.
The passenger station closed in 1965 and the line to the jetties stayed open for freight, so the nearest trains are at Par Rail Station and about 1% of residents commute by rail. Buses do more of the work: there are 46 bus stops in the area, though only about 1% of people use one to get to work. Those two numbers together tell you that public transport here exists mainly for people who are not going to a job.
What Fowey actually does is drive, walk, or stay put. About 44% drive to work, roughly 32% work from home and about 19% walk. Around 40% of households run two or more cars, and about 15% have none at all. That last pair is the honest shape of the place: a town compact enough to walk across, sitting in a county where anything beyond it needs a vehicle.
Getting to the nearest town centre takes about 25 minutes by car and about 44 minutes on public transport. On a bike it is roughly 50 minutes, and on foot it is around 119 minutes, which is not a commute so much as an expedition. Those are modelled figures for the area as a whole rather than a route from any particular front door, and they date from 2019, so the public transport half deserves more suspicion than the driving half.
The bus service itself is better than the commuting figures suggest. Of the 46 stops, 23 have published timetable data, and those average around 54 scheduled departures on a weekday. At peak that works out at roughly two buses in the hour at the average stop. Every one of those 23 stops has some weekend service, which in rural Cornwall is not a given and is worth more than a stop with a shelter and a ghost timetable.
For everyday destinations, the Department for Transport's journey-time statistics put a food store about 14 minutes away on foot or seven by car, and a doctor's surgery about 18 minutes on foot, 13 by public transport or eight by car. Employment centres are about six minutes by car and about 54 by public transport. A hospital is about 61 minutes by car and around 77 by public transport, and that hospital figure is the one that quietly ends conversations for anyone weighing up a move later in life. The same caveat applies throughout: modelled for the area, and the public transport times are the older, less reliable half.
Broadband is the surprise. Superfast reaches about 95% of premises, ultrafast about 46% and gigabit about 45%, with only a fraction of a percent falling below the universal service obligation. For a town where the roads were laid out for handcarts, having a faster connection than the drive to the shops is its own kind of joke. Mobile coverage holds up too: modern data coverage reaches essentially the whole area from at least one operator, and about 95% of it from every operator.
Noise is a non-issue. No postcodes here sit near or above 65 decibels from road traffic, the level at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, and none do from rail either. The freight line does its work without troubling the sound maps.
Electric charging is thinner. There are three public charge points in the area offering eight connections between them, and none of them are rapid. Charging here is something you plan around an evening rather than something you do while picking up milk.
Connectivity is where Fowey is weakest, and no amount of broadband speed disguises it. If the job requires a station, a motorway or a fast charger, this is not the postcode; if it requires a laptop and a view, the town has already worked that out.