Kensington is easy to live in without travelling much, and it only looks middling once you count the trains. Two-thirds of working residents work from home. Half the households have no car. Hardly anyone takes the train to work. The buses never stop, and neither does the traffic.
The only railway stations Kensington can claim are on its edges. Kensington (Olympia) serves the western side, with West Brompton and Shepherds Bush in the neighbouring districts. About 1% of working residents commuted by train, and about 3% by bus, from 67 bus stops in and around the area. For a central London neighbourhood, those are tiny shares.
The reason is that most people don't commute at all. About 67% of working residents worked from home. Walking was the next biggest share at about 7%, then driving at about 6% and cycling at about 3%. About 52% of households have no car, and about 12% have two or more. For most of Kensington, the broadband line does the job a commute would.
According to the Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics, the nearest town centre is about 13 minutes away by car, about 22 by public transport, about 15 by bike and about 32 on foot. They are averages for the area as a whole, and no street gets exactly those times.
Everyday trips are short on the same modelled figures. A GP is about 6 minutes away on foot or by public transport, or 7 by car. A food store is about 5 minutes' walk, or 7 minutes by car. A hospital is about 14 minutes by car or 20 by public transport, and the nearest employment centre is about 4 minutes by car or 10 by public transport. The distances don't change, but the public transport times date from 2019, and some services have been cut since then, so those are the least reliable figures here.
The bus service is current and heavy. The stops average about 716 scheduled departures each on a weekday, around 37 in the peak hour, and every one of them has a weekend service. At that frequency, nobody here bothers learning a timetable.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 92% of premises, ultrafast about 94% and superfast about 97%. Every postcode has 4G or 5G from every network, so mobile coverage is the least of anyone's worries.
Road noise is the cost of all those buses. Official noise mapping treats 65 decibels as the level where road noise becomes significant, and 100% of Kensington's postcodes are near or above it. The loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source, and only about 1% of postcodes are near that threshold for trains, peaking at 70 decibels. On a flat facing a main road, ask which way the bedrooms face, because in Kensington the double glazing matters.
The area has 106 public charge points with 120 connectors, and two of them are rapid. With only two rapid units, charging is something you plan for rather than do while you shop.
In practice, a typical Kensington commute is either a walk to the desk at home or a short bus ride, and very few people bother with the car or the train.
Kensington's connections are middling on paper. The buses and the broadband are excellent, and the trains are mostly at someone else's station.