Lyneham is poorly connected unless you count your car keys. Almost nobody here commutes by train. Half of all households run two cars or more. Superfast broadband reaches nearly every home, but gigabit barely exists. In Lyneham, a second car is part of the public transport network.
No railway station falls within the scope of this page. At the 2021 Census, fewer than 1% of working residents went to work by train. The village has 13 bus stops, and about 1% of working residents commuted by bus. Neither number means much when you're choosing a house.
Most commuting here happens at home or behind the wheel. At the Census, about 47% of working residents worked from home and about 33% drove. About 11% walked and about 4% cycled. The large institutional establishment in the village skews these shares, as it skews most of Lyneham's averages, so treat the home-working figure as inflated. Car ownership shows how households have adapted: only about 8% have no car, and about 50% have two or more. The spare car on the drive is there because the bus doesn't reach where people need to go.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre about 17 minutes away by car and about 34 minutes by public transport. That is double the time for the same trip, and the bus has to be running before any of it counts.
Superfast broadband reaches about 97% of premises, and nobody falls below the legal minimum speed. Gigabit and ultrafast both reach only about 8%. Video calls work fine. Anyone running a household of streamers and a home office on the same line should check the exact address before assuming the fibre has arrived.
Every postcode gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and about 98% get it from all of them. Your phone contract is the one part of Lyneham's connectivity you won't have to think about.
For a typical commute, the car is the default and everything else is a backup. Work-from-home jobs suit Lyneham. Jobs that need a daily train do not.
The same modelling times the town-centre trip at about 32 minutes by bike and about 89 minutes on foot. These times are modelled for the area as a whole, not measured from any particular front door. An hour and a half's walk to the nearest town centre means Lyneham's pavements stop at the edge of the village.
For everyday destinations, the Department for Transport puts a GP about 18 minutes away by car, about 34 by public transport and about 90 on foot. A hospital is about 32 minutes by car and about 81 by public transport. A food store is closer: about 8 minutes by car or about a 20-minute walk. Reaching a sizeable pool of jobs takes about 41 minutes by car, and oddly only about 25 by public transport in the model. The public transport figures date from 2019, and bus services have been cut in many places since, so give them less weight than the car and walking times. Walking to the doctor takes an hour and a half, and nobody here will be doing it.
The current bus timetable is better than the commuting figures suggest. The 10 stops with timetable data average about 49 departures each on a weekday and about 2.5 buses an hour at peak. All 10 have some weekend service. The buses run. Few people use them to get to work, which shows how far the routes are from matching where people's jobs are.
Road noise is the price of being near the traffic. Every postcode in the village sits near a stretch of road modelled at 65 decibels or more, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant. The loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. How loud that sounds inside a particular house depends on distance, glazing and which way the bedroom faces, so listen for it on a weekday viewing. Rail noise doesn't register at all, and with no trains nearby, there's nothing to make it.
Connectivity is Lyneham's weak spot. Superfast broadband and good phone signal can't make up for a village where getting anywhere means getting in the car.