Badly, unless you count the car, and here everybody counts the car. There is no station in the town. The share of residents commuting by train rounds to zero. Roughly two in three drive to work. The motorway did this town a favour in the 1970s and the town has been repaying it every morning since.
On rail, the nearest option is Bridgwater Rail Station, which is a drive or a bus ride away rather than a walk, and the commuting figures from the 2021 census show what that does in practice: the train share rounds to zero. Buses are better provided than used, with 16 stops across the area and about 3% of residents commuting by bus.
The commute mix tells the real story. About 63% drive to work. Roughly 21% work from home, which is now the second-biggest category and the quiet compromise this town has arrived at. About 7% walk and around 2% cycle. On cars, roughly 48% of households run two or more, and about 15% have none at all, which is a smaller minority than in most towns and a harder life here than in most towns.
For everyday distances, the Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre about 16 minutes away by car and about 25 minutes by public transport. That is a narrow gap by rural standards and the one genuinely encouraging figure in this section.
Broadband is the opposite story to the roads. Superfast is available at effectively all 121 postcodes in the area, and nothing sits below the universal service obligation. Gigabit, though, reaches only about 17% of them, and ultrafast the same 17%. So the working-from-home fifth of the town is on connections that are perfectly adequate and unlikely to impress anyone who has just moved out of a city with full-fibre everywhere.
Mobile coverage is close to complete, with roughly 100% of the area covered by at least one operator for fourth or fifth-generation service and about 97% covered by all of them. Whichever network you are on, it works.
What all of this means in practice is simple. This is a two-car town with a home-working habit, where the daily journey is a short drive rather than a long one, and where giving up the car is a lifestyle experiment rather than a lifestyle choice.
Rounding out the modelled journey times, and these are national statistics for the area rather than a route from any particular front door, the nearest town centre is about 25 minutes by bicycle and about 64 minutes on foot. An hour's walk to the nearest town centre is the finding, not a footnote. Nobody is doing that twice a day.
The same modelled statistics, which date from 2019 for public transport and should be treated with more caution there than for cars and walking because services have been cut since, put a general practice about 6 minutes away by car and roughly 7 minutes on foot or by public transport, a food store about 5 minutes on foot and 6 by car, and employment centres about 8 minutes by car against roughly 20 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier at about 28 minutes by car and around 56 minutes by public transport, which is a long time to sit on a bus while feeling unwell.
The buses themselves are better than the usage suggests, and this part of the picture is current rather than modelled. Across the 10 stops carrying service data, there are about 106 scheduled departures per stop on a weekday, roughly 7 an hour at peak, and all 10 stops have some weekend service. That is a real service by rural standards. It is also a service that 3% of commuters use, which tells you where it goes rather than how often it runs.
On noise, all 121 postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels for road noise in the official mapping, which is the level at which road noise is treated as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is mapped separately and reaches all postcodes too, topping out at 70 decibels. A road that takes traffic away from your high street has to put it somewhere.
Connectivity is where this town is weakest, and no amount of good broadband patches it: without a car you are negotiating, not commuting. Come here with two sets of keys and a home-working arrangement and it works fine, which is precisely what most people have already done.