Peckham is well connected, mostly by bus. It has three stations, yet more people commute on a bus than on a train. The biggest group of workers doesn't commute at all. Most households have no car, and every everyday errand is within a short walk or ride. The weak spot is the noise all this traffic makes.
Peckham Rye, Queens Road Peckham and Nunhead stations all serve the district, but at the 2021 Census only about 6% of working residents took the train to work. The bus carried about 18%, from 185 stops across the district. The railway gets the postcards, and the buses do the shift.
The Census commute mix puts working from home on top, at about 43%. Driving accounts for about 11%, with cycling and walking at about 7% each. About 56% of households have no car and only about 7% have two or more. The largest commuting group in Peckham went nowhere at all, and the second-largest went by bus.
The buses run at real frequency. The average stop in Peckham sees about 637 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 34 in the busiest hour, and every one of the 172 stops with timetable data has some weekend service. Those counts are current. At 34 buses an hour, a timetable is something you never need to look up.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times for the area put the nearest town centre about 9 minutes away by car, 10 by bike, 13 by public transport and 16 on foot. Every mode gets there inside a quarter of an hour, which in inner London is about as good as it gets.
The same Department for Transport statistics cover everyday trips. A GP is about 7 minutes by car, on foot or by public transport, and a food store about 5 minutes' walk or 7 by car. Employment is about 12 minutes by car or public transport, and 5 by bike. The hospital is the outlier: about 13 minutes by car, 23 by public transport and 35 on foot. These are modelled averages from 2019. The walking and driving times hold up because the distances haven't moved, and the public transport times are the shakiest, since services may have changed since. The hospital is the only trip that needs planning.
Broadband is close to complete. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 91% of premises and superfast about 97%, and no property falls below the government's minimum broadband standard. Every network has 4G or 5G coverage across the whole district. Peckham is better wired than it is quiet.
The noise maps show it. About 93% of Peckham's postcodes are near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official noise mapping counts road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. Rail is a separate source, putting about 13% of postcodes near or above the same threshold, again peaking at 75 decibels. Those are mapped levels for the postcode, and the bedroom on the back of a particular flat may hear far less of it than the front. The government's published road and rail noise maps show the band for a specific street, and they are worth comparing with the side of the building the bedroom faces.
There are 721 public charge points in and around the district, with 755 connectors between them, and 5 of those are rapid units. That is a lot of plugs for a district where most households don't own a car, and only those 5 will fill a car up while you buy the milk.
Living here without a car is easy. The bus is frequent enough to plan nothing around, the station is close for anyone heading into central London, and a bike gets you to work faster than anything else in the Department for Transport's model.
Peckham is well connected, by bus and fibre more than by train, and its real cost is the traffic noise that comes with it.