Marlow is well wired and poorly railed. Half the working residents stay home. Almost nobody commutes by train. Gigabit broadband reaches nine homes in ten. The connection that matters most in Marlow runs through the router.
Marlow Rail Station is the end of a single-track branch line, with Bourne End, Cookham and Furze Platt along the way and the change for the main line at Maidenhead Rail Station; High Wycombe Rail Station is the other option, by road. At the 2021 Census about 1% of working residents took the train to work, and about 1% the bus, from an area with 50 bus stops. The town grew rich as an inland port, and the river still moves more people for pleasure than the branch line moves for work.
The real commute is the one that never happens. About half of working residents worked from home at the 2021 Census, about 37% drove, and about 8% walked; cycling barely registered at about 1%. Around 48% of households have two cars or more and about 11% have none. Marlow is a town that either stays put or drives.
On the Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics for 2019, the town centre is about 9 minutes away by car, 12 by bike, 16 by public transport and 21 on foot from the average home. A GP is about 9 minutes by car, 17 by public transport or 20 on foot, and a food store about a 12-minute walk or 7 minutes' drive. The nearest hospital is about 18 minutes by car and 46 by public transport, and the nearest large employment centre about 10 minutes by car or 17 by bus. Distances to fixed places do not move, but the public transport times describe the 2019 timetable and services have been cut since, so they are the least trustworthy of the set. On foot, the hospital is about 88 minutes away and the nearest big employment site about 87, which settles the question of walking to work for anyone who does not work in Marlow.
The bus timetable today is thinner than the stop count suggests. Each stop averages 27 scheduled departures on a weekday and between one and two an hour at peak, and only about half of stops have any weekend service at all. A bus every forty minutes or so is a service for people with flexible days, and about half the stops give up altogether on Saturday.
Broadband is the strong suit. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 92% of premises, ultrafast about 93% and superfast all of them, with nobody below the legal minimum speed. Mobile signal follows suit: at least one operator covers every postcode with 4G or 5G, and all of them cover about 98%. Marlow is better plugged into the internet than into the rail network that runs right into it.
Road noise is the hidden price of the roads everyone drives on. Every postcode in the area is near or above 65 decibels on the official noise mapping, the level at which road noise is treated as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise registers at no postcode, which is the single-track branch line's one undisputed advantage. The mapping describes the area around each postcode, so it cannot say how a particular bedroom sounds with the windows shut.
There are 13 public charge points in the area with 18 connectors between them, and one of those is rapid. For electric car owners without a driveway, charging is something to plan around, since a single rapid unit is a queue waiting to form.
For a typical household the picture is clear enough: a short drive to most things, fast broadband for the days at home, and a train service best saved for days when the time it takes does not matter.
Marlow is middling for connections: excellent online, adequate by road and thin on buses and trains. It suits people who mostly stay put and can drive when they need to.