Herne Bay is well connected if you work from the spare room, and so-so for everyone else. A quarter of workers stay at home. More than half drive. Hardly anyone takes the train to work. The fibre is the quickest route out of town.
Herne Bay Rail Station has direct trains to London, including high-speed services, and Chestfield & Swalecliffe Rail Station and Whitstable Rail Station are a short way west. At the 2021 Census, only about 2% of workers commuted by train. The area has 100 bus stops, and about 3% of workers took the bus. A town with direct trains to the capital that barely uses them to get to work has already told you what kind of town it is.
The commute that counts is the one to the car or the desk. About 55% of workers drove and about 25% worked from home. Walking accounted for about 8% and cycling about 1%. About a fifth of households have no car and about 36% have two or more, so the driveway is sized for the household's ambitions, not the bus timetable's.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, modelled for the area rather than timed from any particular door, put the nearest town centre about 9 minutes away by car, 14 by public transport, 13 by bike and 22 on foot. A GP is about 8 minutes by car, 15 by public transport or 20 on foot. A food store is about 7 minutes by car or 8 on foot, close enough that forgetting the milk costs a stroll rather than a trip. Employment centres are about 8 minutes by car and 22 by public transport. The hospital is the one that stretches: about 28 minutes by car and 54 by public transport. The public transport figures date from 2019 and services have been cut since, so treat them with more caution than the car and walking times.
The buses are better than the commuting figures suggest. The 97 stops with timetable data average about 80 scheduled departures each on a weekday and about four an hour at peak, and 85% of stops have some weekend service. Those figures are current. The buses are running. People here just prefer the car.
Broadband is where Herne Bay does best. Gigabit-capable broadband reaches about 92% of premises, ultrafast the same, and superfast reaches everyone, with no premises below the legal minimum service. Mobile is just as tidy: at least one operator covers every postcode with 4G or 5G, and all operators cover about 99%. You won't be standing by the window hunting for a signal.
Road noise is the catch. Every postcode in the area sits near or above the 65-decibel level, the point at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. That's a mapping threshold, not a prediction for any particular bedroom, but a viewing at rush hour tells you more than one on a Sunday morning. Rail noise doesn't register at that level anywhere.
Electric vehicle charging is thin. There are 3 public charge points in the area with 14 connectors between them, and 2 of those are rapid units. With numbers like that, charging is something you plan around rather than something you do while the shopping goes in the boot.
For a typical working day, the car or the home office will serve you best, with the buses as a real backup and the train saved for London.
Herne Bay is reasonably well connected, better than average without being impressive. Its broadband would suit a much bigger town. Its trains mostly serve people going somewhere for the day, not the daily commute.