Poorly, and the town has never pretended otherwise. There is no railway station. Twenty-six bus stops serve the area. Two in five people work from home, which here reads less as a lifestyle preference than as a solution to a problem. Roughly two in five drive to work instead, and the rest mostly walk. Nothing about this place was designed to be commuted from, and the road down the hill has been making that argument for well over a century.
On rail, the position is straightforward: there is none. About a tenth of one percent of residents commute by train, which is what a train share looks like when the nearest train involves getting somewhere else first. Lynton was once the terminus of the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway, a narrow-gauge line serving both this town and the village below it, and the past tense there is the whole story. Buses cover the area from 26 stops, and around 1% of residents use one to get to work.
What people actually do is drive or stay put. Roughly 40% drive to work and about 39% work from home, which are effectively the two answers this town gives. Around 14% walk, and cycling accounts for under 1%, which anyone who has looked at the gradient will find unsurprising. About 14% of households have no car at all, while roughly 44% run two or more. In a place with this topography, the second car is not affluence, it is infrastructure.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre at about 37 minutes by car and roughly 53 minutes by public transport. By bicycle it comes out at about 81 minutes, and on foot at around 119 minutes, which is close to two hours and is itself the finding rather than a footnote to it. These are modelled figures for the area as a whole rather than a route from any particular front door, and they date from 2019, so the car and walking numbers have aged considerably better than the public transport ones. What it means in practice is that a daily commute to anywhere with a high street is a real commitment, and that the town works best for people whose work either happens at home or happens within the valley.
Broadband is the part where the twenty-first century turned up. Gigabit-capable service reaches about 65% of premises and superfast about 74%, with roughly 2% of premises falling below the universal service obligation, the minimum speed standard households are entitled to request. That is a better connection to the outside world than the roads manage, and it explains the working-from-home share more honestly than any lifestyle theory does.
Mobile is close to universal for anyone not fussy about their provider: fourth or fifth generation service reaches nearly 100% of the area from at least one operator, and about 96% from all of them.
For everyday destinations, the same modelled statistics put a general practice at about 12 minutes by car, roughly 25 by public transport and around 55 on foot. A hospital is about 41 minutes by car and roughly 64 by public transport. A food store is about nine minutes' drive or around 27 minutes' walk. Employment centres come out at roughly 57 minutes by car and about 35 by public transport, which is one of those modelling quirks worth treating with suspicion rather than enthusiasm. Distances to fixed places do not change; bus timetables do, and these were drawn in 2019.
Stops are not the same as service. Across the 26 stops with timetable data, the average is about 26 scheduled departures on a weekday and roughly two buses per stop in the peak hour. Around 85% of stops see some weekend service, which is better than most rural areas manage. Two buses an hour at peak across a stop is a service you plan your day around rather than one you turn up for.
Noise is one thing the roads give back. No postcodes in the area sit at or near the 65-decibel threshold that official mapping treats as significant road noise, and none do for railway noise either, on account of there being no railway.
Electric vehicle charging is thin: three public charge points in the area providing nine connections in total, of which one is rapid. With a single rapid unit, charging here is something you schedule rather than something that happens while you buy milk.
Connectivity is the weakest column in this town's entire account, and it is not close. The compensation is that everything the town does well depends on exactly the same isolation that makes the travelling hard.