Huntley is well connected only if you drive, and patchy in every other way. No one commutes by train. A third of workers don't commute at all. More than half of households have two or more cars. The broadband is better than the bus service.
No working resident of Huntley gave the train as their way to work at the 2021 Census, and none of the places around the village has a railway station. There are 18 bus stops in and around the village, and only about 2% of workers used a bus to get to work.
The Census shows how people actually get to work. About 59% drive and about 32% work from home. Walking accounts for about 3% and cycling barely registers. About 53% of households have two or more cars, and only about 8% have none. In Huntley, a household with no car is the exception, and every route out of the village is planned around one.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which date from 2019, put the nearest town centre 18 minutes away by car, 29 by public transport, 36 by bike and 102 on foot. A walk of over an hour and a half tells you that Huntley is a village where getting to town is a drive.
Fixed broadband is the strongest connection Huntley has. Superfast broadband reaches every postcode, gigabit and ultrafast connections each reach about 79%, and no postcode falls below the legal minimum service. Mobile is close to complete as well: almost every postcode gets a 4G or 5G signal from at least one network, and about 93% get one from all of them. Ask the seller which provider actually serves the house, because one in five postcodes still lacks the gigabit connection.
For a typical commuter, all of this adds up to a car and a choice of hours. For the third who work from home, it adds up to a router.
The same Department for Transport model, from 2019 and based on averages across the area, puts a GP surgery 14 minutes away by car, 24 by public transport and 86 on foot. A hospital is 25 minutes by car or 40 by public transport, the nearest food store 7 minutes by car or a 16-minute walk, and the nearest centre of employment 21 minutes by car or 20 by public transport. Distances to fixed places like these have not changed, but bus services have been cut since 2019, so the public transport times are the ones to trust least. On the model, the bus reaches the jobs a minute ahead of the car. That is the only contest the bus wins here.
Today's timetables are more reliable than the 2019 model. The eight stops with timetable data average about 22 departures each on a weekday, about one bus an hour at peak, and every one of them has some weekend service. That is a real bus service, but you have to plan around it.
Road noise is the price of living near a junction. Every postcode in Huntley is near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road traffic as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise doesn't register. The roads to Mitcheldean and Ross-on-Wye were turnpiked in 1726, and the toll house at their junction still stands, so traffic has shaped the village for three centuries.
Connectivity in Huntley is poor for anyone without a car and fine for anyone with one, so it falls below average.