Not well, and the town has stopped pretending otherwise. Under one in a hundred people here commutes by train. Nearly six in ten drive to work. More than a quarter work from home and never leave the postcode at all. Mere has solved its transport problem by quietly arranging not to have one, which works beautifully right up until the morning you need to be somewhere at nine.
There is no station in Mere. The rail option in range is Gillingham (Dorset) Rail Station, and the take-up tells you how workable that is in practice: under 1% of working residents commute by train. Buses fare no better. There are 16 bus stops across the area and under 1% of people use one to get to work. Both of those numbers are the sound of a timetable losing an argument with a car key.
The commute mix is where the real answer lives. About 58% of working residents drive. About 27% work from home, which for a town this size is the single most consequential fact about its transport arrangements. Around 9% walk and about 1% cycle. Roughly 44% of households run two or more cars, and about 13% have none at all. That second group is small, and it is the group for whom every other paragraph on this page matters most.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre at about 16 minutes by car and about 48 minutes on public transport. Three times as long is not a choice anybody makes twice.
Those same statistics put the town centre at roughly 35 minutes by bicycle and about 96 minutes on foot. An hour and a half of walking is not a commute, it is a hobby, and stating it plainly is more use than dressing it up. All of these are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door, and the public transport figures date from 2019, since when services have been withdrawn rather than added. Treat the car and walking times as solid and the bus and train times as optimistic.
For everyday errands the picture improves, mostly because the errands are close. The same Department for Transport statistics put a doctor's surgery at about 8 minutes by car, roughly 25 minutes on foot and about 25 minutes on public transport, which is one of the rare cases where the bus does not embarrass itself. A food store is around 8 minutes by car or about 28 minutes walking. Employment centres sit at roughly 32 minutes by car and about 29 minutes by public transport. A hospital is the outlier and the one worth thinking about properly: about 38 minutes by car, or roughly 107 minutes on public transport. Nearly two hours to reach a hospital without a car is the kind of figure that should shape a decision rather than decorate one.
On the buses themselves, counting departures rather than routes, the ten stops with published service data average about 7 scheduled weekday departures each and none at all in the peak hour. About 60% of stops get any weekend service. A stop with seven buses across an entire weekday is a stop, not a service, and the peak-hour figure is the one that ends the conversation for commuters.
Broadband is the genuine bright spot. Superfast reaches every premise in the town, gigabit-capable connections reach about 40%, and no postcode falls below the universal service obligation. Mobile coverage matches it: every postcode gets fourth or fifth generation service from at least one operator, and about 98% get it from all of them. The digital connection is the one that actually works, which is presumably why so many people gave up on the physical one and started working from the spare room.
Road noise is the counterweight. Every postcode in the town sits near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as worth recording, and the loudest mapped band reaches 75 decibels or above. Rail noise does not register here at all. How that translates inside any particular house depends on the house, the glazing and which way the bedroom faces, none of which a percentage can tell you.
Connectivity is comfortably the weakest thing about Mere. No station, a bus network that gives up before the peak hour, and a hospital nearly two hours away by public transport. The broadband is excellent, which is fortunate, because for a great many residents it is the only connection they use.