By car and broadband, well. By anything else, less so. Almost half of working residents work from home. Most of the rest drive. Hardly anyone takes the train, even with three stations within reach. In Oakley, the broadband gets more use than the railway.
There are rail stations at Basingstoke, Overton and Micheldever, but about 1% of working residents commute by train. Buses carry about 1% as well, despite 395 bus stops across the wider area. For most people here, public transport is something they use occasionally, not the way they get to work.
The commute mix explains it. About 46% of working residents work from home and about 44% drive. Walking accounts for about 3%, and cycling barely registers. About 61% of households run two or more cars, and only about 7% have none. The pattern holds together: the people who still travel to work drive, and the rest have stopped travelling.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, which are modelled for the area rather than timed from any particular front door, put Basingstoke town centre about 19 minutes away by car. By bicycle it's about 40 minutes, and by public transport about 54. On foot it's about 102 minutes. Nobody walks into town from here, and the modelled figures agree.
Everyday destinations follow the same pattern. The same statistics put a GP surgery about 16 minutes away by car, 46 by public transport and 76 on foot, and a hospital about 21 minutes by car or 67 by public transport. A food store is about 9 minutes by car or about 30 on foot. For employment, the model gives about 50 minutes by car and about 15 by public transport. That's an odd inversion that reflects how the model defines employment destinations, so don't plan a commute around it. The public transport figures date from 2019, and services have been cut since in many places, so treat them with more caution than the car and walking times.
The bus picture is better than the commute share suggests. Current timetable data puts the average stop at about 190 scheduled departures on a weekday, with about 12 in the peak hour. About 83% of stops with timetable data have some weekend service. Those are counts of departures, not routes, and they're averaged across a wide area that includes busier roads towards the town. The stop outside a particular house may not match the average.
Broadband is what makes the home-working possible. About 62% of premises can get gigabit broadband and about 90% can get superfast. About 2% fall below the legal minimum service level, and those households will have the worst video calls in the village. Buyers should check the specific address before the survey rather than after.
Mobile coverage is barely an issue: 4G or 5G from at least one operator reaches the whole area, and from all operators about 99% of it.
Road noise is widespread. About 99% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source: about 37% of postcodes sit near or above the same 65-decibel threshold for rail, also peaking at 75 decibels. Those are area-level mapping bands. They don't predict what a particular bedroom will sound like, so visit at rush hour and listen for yourself.
Electric vehicle drivers are reasonably served. There are 25 public charge points in the area with 61 connectors between them, and 11 of those connectors are rapid. The rapid count matters most, because it decides whether you can top up while doing something else or have to plan around the charger.
For a typical working week, that means a car for anything outside the village and a good broadband line for everything else. The train is there for the occasional trip, and most people drive to the station.
Oakley is fairly well connected, with a gap. The roads and broadband are good. Public transport is the weak point, and residents here don't rely on it.