Great Missenden is well connected if you're going to London by train or anywhere else by car, and poorly connected if you need a bus. The village has its own station with direct trains to London. Half of working residents don't travel to work at all. Four in ten drive. Hardly anyone uses the buses, and at peak times there are hardly any buses to use.
Great Missenden station is on the line between London Marylebone and Aylesbury. Amersham, Wendover, Princes Risborough and High Wycombe stations are all close enough to use as alternatives, depending on direction. At the 2021 Census about 2% of working residents went to work by train and under 1% by bus, even though the area has 134 bus stops.
How people here actually get to work matters more than the timetable. At the 2021 Census about 51% of working residents worked from home, about 39% drove and about 3% walked. Only about 6% of households have no car, and about 61% have two or more. The station is close by, but the car does most of the work.
The Department for Transport's 2019 modelled journey times put the nearest town centre about 14 minutes away by car, 30 minutes by public transport, 29 minutes by bike and 76 minutes on foot. That walk is too long for anyone to do as a matter of routine, so a town-centre trip means the car or the bus.
The same Department for Transport modelling puts a GP surgery about 9 minutes away by car, 18 minutes by public transport and 30 minutes on foot. A hospital is about 21 minutes by car and 58 minutes by public transport. A food store is about 9 minutes by car or a 25-minute walk. Employment is about 28 minutes by car and 20 minutes by public transport. These are modelled averages for the whole area. The car and walking times hold up well because the destinations haven't moved. The public transport times date from 2019, before later service cuts, so they are the least reliable. Getting to work is the one journey in that table where public transport is quicker than the car, and almost nobody here makes it that way.
The bus timetable shows how thin the service is. A typical stop has about six scheduled departures on a weekday and about 0.3 in the peak hour. About 70% of stops have any weekend service at all. With fewer than one bus an hour at most stops in the morning rush, the bus can't be relied on for getting to work.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 68% of premises and superfast about 95%. That matters in a village where half the workforce works from home. Mobile coverage is almost complete: every postcode has a signal from at least one network, and about 98% have one from all of them.
Road noise is the price of having the main London to Aylesbury road run along the valley. More than 99% of postcodes are near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant. The loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source, and about 6% of postcodes are near the 65-decibel threshold for it. The mapping covers postcodes, not individual houses, so how loud a particular home is depends on where it is. Visiting a house in the morning rush hour will show what the figures can't.
There are two public charge points in the area with two connectors between them, and none are rapid. In a village where six in ten households have at least two cars, charging an electric car means a charger at home.
Great Missenden's connections are middling. The train to London and the drive anywhere else work well enough. Without a car, it is hard to get around.