New Alresford is well connected only if you own a car. Almost nobody here commutes by train, because the town has no working railway station. Getting on for half the working population drives to work. A little over four in ten work from home. The town runs on tarmac and broadband, not on timetables.
The rail situation is the heart of the problem, and it is a quirk of history rather than an oversight. The line that survives through the town is the Watercress Line, which since 1973 has run as a heritage railway toward Alton for the pleasure of the ride rather than as a way of getting to an office. There is no through main-line service to catch. The upshot is that the share of residents commuting by train rounds to about a third of one percent, which in a town this size means a handful of people at most. Buses do a little more of the work, with close to forty bus stops dotted across the town and routes heading toward Winchester and on to Alton and Petersfield, but only around one in a hundred residents actually commutes by bus. The network is there as a safety net more than a serious alternative to driving.
Where the town does connect well is online. About half of homes can get gigabit broadband, and near enough every home can reach superfast speeds, so the digital link is in far better shape than the physical one. For the four in ten households working from home, that is the connection that counts, and it quietly explains how a town with no station functions at all. The fibre did what the railway stopped doing.
For getting about day to day, the reality is a car-shaped one. The nearest town centre is roughly nine minutes away by car and around sixteen by public transport, which tells you which mode the place is actually built for. A main road skirts the town and carries most of the driving. Walking covers the short local trips, with roughly eight percent of people getting to work on foot, but anyone whose job is further afield either drives the whole way or drives out of town to reach a station somewhere else. There is no version of a daily rail commute that starts at your front door here. It starts in the car park of a station you have to reach first.
On connectivity, New Alresford lands below average, and it earns that rating honestly. If your life runs on a car and a broadband line, the town works perfectly well and you will barely notice the gap. If it runs on catching a train, this is the wrong town, and no amount of fibre will fix that.