Badly to everywhere else, brilliantly to itself. Nearly nobody here commutes by train or bus. More people walk to work than drive. About four in ten households have no car at all. Superfast broadband reaches almost everything. The internet arrives faster than the post, and that is the whole connectivity story in one line.
Rail is a mainland concept. The only station in range is Penzance Rail Station, which is on the far side of open water, and fewer than 1% of working residents commute by train. Buses do exist: 196 stops sit within the area, though under 1% of people use one to get to work. The stops are there for visitors, for the island loop and for people without a car, rather than for a commute anyone would recognise.
What people actually do is walk. About 28% of working residents get to work on foot, about 27% work from home, about 27% drive and about 10% cycle. Car ownership follows: roughly 41% of households have no car, and about 20% have two or more. That is a commute mix no mainland town produces, and it is the single best thing about living here. The work is close, the roads are short, and on most islands a car would be an expensive way of arriving three minutes earlier.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics for the area then do something quietly funny. The nearest town centre comes out at roughly 120 minutes by car, by public transport, by bicycle and on foot. Those are figures for the area rather than a route from any specific front door, and 120 minutes is where the scale tops out. The model has been asked how long it takes to drive to town from an island and has responded with a polite shrug.
The same modelling puts a hospital at roughly 120 minutes by car and by public transport, which carries the same meaning. A doctor is far more reachable: about 32 minutes by car, about 34 by bicycle, and about 38 minutes on foot or by public transport. A food store is about 31 minutes by car and about 35 minutes on foot. Employment centres come out at about 24 minutes by car, about 82 minutes by public transport, and 120 minutes walking. Those figures date from 2019, and while the distance to a fixed destination does not change, the public transport times have aged worse than the car and walk times as services have been trimmed.
The current bus picture is better than the commute share suggests. Across stops with published service data, the average is about 25 scheduled departures per stop on a weekday, roughly 2 at the peak hour, with about 89% of stops carrying some weekend service. That counts departures rather than routes, and it describes a working local service rather than a lifeline you could time a job around.
Broadband is where the islands outperform their geography. Superfast reaches about 96% of premises, gigabit and ultrafast both reach about 49%, and under 1% of premises sit below the universal service obligation. For anyone whose job travels down a cable, this is a genuinely well-connected place. Mobile coverage backs it up: at least one operator reaches close to 100% of premises, and all operators reach about 96%, so the network you already pay for probably works.
Road noise is a non-issue. No postcodes here sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, and the same is true for rail. The loudest thing outside your window will have feathers.
Electric vehicles are the one area where the numbers are almost comically small. The area has 4 public charge points with 7 connections between them, of which 1 is rapid. Charging is something you plan around rather than something you do while buying milk, though with a road network this short the daily demand is modest.
Connectivity here lands middling, and only because two opposite truths cancel each other out. Getting anywhere on the mainland is a production; getting anywhere on the islands is a walk, and the broadband means a growing number of people never need to make the first journey at all.