Poorly, and the railway does not rescue it. Half the working village drives. Well over a third never leaves the house to go to work at all. Nearly half of households run two cars or more. There is a branch line with stations carrying the village's own name, and it functions mostly as scenery with a timetable.
The rail picture is better on a map than in practice. Lelant Rail Station and Lelant Saltings Rail Station both sit on the branch line, with St Erth Rail Station as the junction inland, Carbis Bay Rail Station and St Ives Rail Station further along the coast, and Hayle Rail Station the other way. Despite all that track, roughly two commuters in every thousand travel to work by train. Twelve bus stops serve the area and about 3% of commuters use them.
What people actually do is drive or stay put. About 51% commute by car and 37% work from home, which between them account for most of the working population. Walking takes about 3% and cycling about 1%. Around 8% of households have no car, while roughly 49% keep two or more, and in a village of this size that second vehicle is not an indulgence, it is infrastructure.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which describe the area rather than any particular front door, put the nearest town centre about 14 minutes away by car and 32 by public transport. Cycling comes in around 30 minutes, and walking around 83, which is the sort of number that stops being a journey and starts being an afternoon.
For everyday needs the same modelling gives a doctor's surgery about 13 minutes by car, 29 by public transport and 59 on foot. A hospital runs around 16 minutes by car and 39 by public transport. A food shop is roughly nine minutes by car and 30 on foot. Employment centres sit about 27 minutes away by car and 37 by public transport. Those distances are stable, but the public transport times date from 2019 and services have been withdrawn across rural Cornwall since, so treat them as the optimistic version rather than the current one.
Current bus data is more encouraging than the commute share suggests. Across the stops with published service information, there are about 59 scheduled weekday departures per stop, roughly three buses in the peak hour, and every one of those stops has some weekend service. Three buses an hour at peak is a real service rather than a gesture, though it is a count of departures rather than a choice of destinations, and the number of people using it tells its own story.
Broadband is the part that works. Superfast reaches about 99% of premises, gigabit and ultrafast both around 45%, and nothing falls below the minimum speed standard. Mobile coverage is near universal from at least one operator at about 100% of the area, with roughly 95% covered by all of them, so the dead-spot problem is somebody else's.
On noise, about 39% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels from road traffic, the level at which official mapping treats road noise as a matter worth recording, with the loudest band present reaching 75 decibels. No postcodes reach that threshold from railway noise, which is one thing the branch line can be thanked for. How any individual house sounds depends on which side of the road it faces.
Connectivity is where Lelant is genuinely weak: two stations almost nobody commutes from, a bus network carrying a fraction of the village, and journey times that make a car the price of participating. The broadband is excellent, which is presumably why so many people here have quietly stopped commuting altogether.