Markyate is poorly connected unless you drive, and most of its residents have drawn the obvious conclusion. Around one commuter in a hundred takes the train. Fewer still take the bus. Half drive and over a third have stopped commuting at all.
There is no station in Markyate. The nearest are Luton Rail Station and Luton Airport Parkway, and getting to either means a drive or a bus first. In the 2021 census about 1% of working residents commuted by train and under 1% by bus. The village has 17 bus stops, so the stops exist and the riders mostly do not.
How Markyate actually gets to work is by car or not at all. About 53% of working residents drive and about 37% work from home, with about 4% walking and cycling barely registering. Only about 9% of households have no car, and about 52% have two or more. The Romans built Watling Street straight through the middle of the village, and the road is still the best-connected thing in it.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre about 13 minutes away by car, 28 by bike, 33 by public transport and about 74 minutes on foot. That last figure is the finding: a walk into town is a morning's outing, not an errand.
The same modelling puts a GP about 13 minutes away by car, 35 by public transport and 64 on foot, and a hospital about 20 minutes by car or 58 by public transport. A food shop is under 15 minutes on foot or about 7 by car, and the nearest cluster of jobs is under 20 minutes by car and under 15 by public transport. These are modelled averages from 2019. The distances have not moved, but buses have been cut since, so the public transport times are the ones most likely to have got worse.
The four stops with timetable data each see about 50 scheduled departures on a weekday, roughly one bus an hour at peak, and all four have some service at weekends. That counts departures and says nothing about where they go. One an hour is a bus to plan around, and nobody runs a job on it without a backup.
Broadband does better than the buses. Superfast speeds reach about 98% of premises, gigabit and ultrafast about 45%, and nowhere falls below the legal minimum. Mobile coverage is near-complete, with some 4G or 5G signal everywhere and every network across nearly all of the village. The 37% working from home have the connection for it, and only about half of them can get the fastest line.
Road noise is the price of sitting on Watling Street with the bypass alongside. Every postcode is near or above 65 decibels, the level official mapping treats as significant road noise, and the loudest band reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise registers nowhere, because there is no railway close enough to make any. The national noise mapping shows which side of the village a house is on, and a home backing onto the main road is in a different position from one tucked behind it, so it is worth looking up the exact address.
Electric drivers have one public charging site with six connectors, one of them rapid. That makes charging at home the plan and the public point the emergency option.
Markyate's connections are poor: a car does the work, broadband covers for the commute, and buses and trains play almost no part in local life.