Better than it was, and still a car town. The broadband is the quickest thing about the place. Most people drive to work, and a fifth never leave the house to do it. The railway came back after decades of near-absence. Everything else here runs on tarmac and patience.
Okehampton Rail Station is the town's own, with Sampford Courtenay Rail Station further along the same line. The census recorded no residents at all commuting by train, though that count was taken in the spring of 2021 and the regular service did not resume until the November, so the zero dates the statistic rather than the railway. Buses cover 39 stops across the area, and about 1% of residents use one to get to work.
What the town actually does is drive. About 55% of working residents commute by car, about 20% work from home, about 17% walk and about 1% cycle. Roughly 18% of households have no car, and about 37% have two or more. That last pair is the honest shape of the place: a town centre where a decent minority manage without a vehicle, wrapped in a catchment where families run two.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which describe the area rather than any particular front door, put the nearest town centre about 7 minutes away by car, about 11 by public transport, about 9 by bicycle and about 13 on foot. Those are unusually tight numbers, and they are the reason the place works on foot at all.
The same statistics put a doctor about 8 minutes away by car, about 18 on foot and about 16 by public transport, and a food store about 7 minutes by car or 9 on foot. A hospital is about 40 minutes by car and about 94 by public transport. Employment centres run about 9 minutes by car against about 32 by public transport. Those public-transport times date from 2019 and rural services have been withdrawn since, so treat them as the optimistic version. The car and walk figures age far better, being mostly a matter of distance.
Buses are worth counting properly, because a stop is not a service. Across the stops carrying published timetable data, the average is about 23 scheduled departures on a weekday, working out at roughly one an hour at peak, and every one of those stops has some weekend service. That is a real network by rural Devon standards and a thin one by everyone else's. Nobody is spontaneous with a bus that comes once an hour.
Broadband is where the town quietly outperforms. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 90% of premises, ultrafast the same, and superfast about 98%. No premises falls below the universal service minimum. For a town at the edge of a moor, that is a better connection than plenty of city suburbs manage.
Mobile coverage from at least one operator reaches effectively the whole area, at about 100%, and all four operators cover about 91% of it. There are worse places to be on the wrong network.
Road noise is a live consideration. About 49% of the town's postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest mapped band reaches 75 decibels. That is half the town within earshot of a road loud enough to be measured, which is what happens to a settlement that has always been a route centre. No postcodes come near the same threshold for rail noise.
Electric vehicles are the gap. The area holds 1 public charge point with 2 connectors between them, and none of them rapid. Charging here is something you plan around overnight at home, not something you do while picking up shopping.
Connectivity comes out middling, held up almost entirely by the internet. The digital side is genuinely strong, the walking distances are short, and the roads work. Public transport is the weak half, with a bus network that counts as adequate only by rural standards and a hospital run that takes well over an hour without a car.