Badly by rail, tolerably by road, and surprisingly well on foot. There is no railway station and almost nobody here commutes by train. Nearly half drive to work, and close to a quarter walk. Superfast broadband reaches almost every premises, while the gigabit kind reaches under a third. Ilfracombe is a town you can live in without a car and cannot comfortably leave without one.
The railway shut in 1970 and nothing replaced it, which shows up in the census as 0.1% of residents travelling to work by train. Buses carry the load instead, from 70 stops across the area, and about 3% of residents commute on them. For a town of this size on a coast this remote, the absence of a station is not a quirk of the timetable. It is the defining transport fact, and every other number here follows from it.
The commute mix tells you how people have adapted. About 48% drive, roughly 23% walk, and around 18% work from home. Cycling accounts for about 1%, which is what happens when the town is built on gradients. Around 28% of households have no car at all, while about 29% run two or more. Both those figures being high at once is the honest shape of the place: a walkable core surrounded by people who need a vehicle to reach anything beyond it.
For the nearest town centre, the Department for Transport's modelled journey times put it at about 7 minutes by car, 10 by public transport, 9 by bicycle and 12 on foot. Those are figures modelled for the area rather than a route measured from any particular front door, but they capture something real: the centre is genuinely close, and the difference between driving and walking to it is three minutes.
The same modelling covers everyday destinations. A food store is about 8 minutes on foot or 7 by car. A doctor's surgery is roughly 7 minutes by car, 12 by public transport, 14 walking. The nearest employment centre is about 9 minutes by car but around 33 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier that matters: about 31 minutes by car and about 48 by public transport. Those public transport times were modelled in 2019, and rural services have been cut since, so treat them as the optimistic version. The car and walk times have aged better because hills do not get withdrawn from service.
On current bus provision rather than stop counts, the 43 stops with published service data average about 39 scheduled weekday departures each, with roughly 2.5 buses in the peak hour, and about 98% of them see some weekend service. That last figure is genuinely good for a rural district. A bus stop with a timetable in the shelter is not the same thing as a bus service, and here the timetables are real.
Broadband splits the town neatly. Superfast reaches about 99% of premises and only around 0.1% fall below the universal service standard. Gigabit and ultrafast both sit at about 28%, so the difference between a fine connection and a fast one comes down to which side of the valley the cabinet serves. Mobile coverage is the quiet success: about 100% of the area gets fourth or fifth generation service from at least one operator, and about 96% from all of them.
Road noise touches a narrow band of the town. About 9% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road traffic as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 70 decibels. No postcode registers rail noise at all, for reasons the timetable already explained.
Electric vehicles are the gap. The area has one public charge point with two connectors and no rapid units at all, which makes charging something you plan an evening around rather than something you do while buying milk.
Connectivity is one of Ilfracombe's weaker suits, and the shape of the weakness is specific: everything within the town is close, and everything outside it is a drive.