Hatfield is well connected on paper and drives anyway. It has its own station on the London line and more stations within reach. Four in five homes can get gigabit broadband. The buses run about every quarter of an hour at peak. Even so, the car does more of the commuting than the train and the bus put together, by a distance.
Hatfield (Herts) station is in the town, with Welham Green, Welwyn Garden City, Welwyn North, Brookmans Park and Potters Bar stations all close by. The 2021 census found about 3% of Hatfield's working residents commuting by train and 4% by bus, from a town with 154 bus stops. Two centuries ago Hatfield was the northern end of the Hatfield and Reading Turnpike, built so travellers could get round London's traffic, and the town has kept the instinct to go by road.
The same census shows how the town gets to work. About 41% drive, 27% work from home and 13% walk, with cycling at about 4%. Car ownership follows the commute: about 23% of households have no car and 35% have two or more. Walking beats the train by a wide margin, which tells you most of Hatfield's jobs are in Hatfield.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times for the area put the nearest town centre about 9 minutes away by car, 12 by bike, 15 by public transport and 18 on foot. Those are averages across the town, and for most addresses the centre is a walk that nobody needs to plan.
The same Department for Transport statistics put a GP about 9 minutes away by car, 13 by public transport and 18 on foot, and a food store 7 minutes by car or 10 on foot. The nearest hospital is about 23 minutes by car and 48 by public transport. Employment centres come out at about 14 minutes by car and 8 by public transport. These are modelled averages, the distances will not have moved, but the public transport times date from 2019 and bus services have been trimmed since, so they are the softest numbers here. On those figures the bus still beats the car to the nearest jobs, which is news to the 41%.
The bus timetable is the current part of the picture. Across Hatfield's stops with service data, the average stop sees about 79 departures on a weekday and about 4 an hour at peak, and 85% of stops have some service at the weekend. That is a working bus network, if not a turn-up-and-go one.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 80% of Hatfield's premises, ultrafast about 83% and superfast about 97%. Mobile coverage is close to complete, with some 4G or 5G signal everywhere and every network available almost everywhere.
Road noise is the cost of all that road. Almost every Hatfield postcode is near or above 65 decibels on the government's road noise mapping, the level at which official mapping treats traffic noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source: about 5% of postcodes are near 65 decibels from the railway, again up to 75. In 1851 the Great North Road was moved so it would not cut through the grounds of Hatfield House, and nobody has extended the same courtesy to anywhere else in town. The strategic noise map for the exact street is worth a look on any house that backs onto a main road or the line.
There are 15 public charge points in the area, with 53 connectors between them, 3 of them rapid. Three rapid chargers means charging here is something an owner plans around, not something done while the shopping goes in the boot.
Hatfield is better connected than most of its residents use it as, with a station, a working bus network and fast broadband, and the road noise is the price of the town's real preference for the car.