Well enough, as long as you own a car or a desk at home. About four in ten work from home. About four in ten drive. Hardly anyone takes the train, even though there is a station in the middle of town. The railway is part of the town's identity more than part of its daily routine.
Petersfield Rail Station sits on the Portsmouth Direct line, the main line between Portsmouth and London, and Liss Rail Station is the next stop along. Only about 2% of working residents commute by train. Buses do even less: there are 72 bus stops in the area, and under 1% of residents use a bus to get to work. The town has direct trains to London and very few people using them daily.
The 2021 census shows how people actually get to work. About 42% drive and about 39% work from home, so between them they account for most of the town. About 11% walk, which is what you get in a compact market town where the office might be off the square. Cycling is about 1%. Car ownership follows the same pattern: about 41% of households have two or more cars, and about 16% have none.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics are modelled for the area, not measured from any particular front door, and they date from 2019. The nearest town centre is about 9 minutes by car, 12 by public transport, 10 by bike and 13 on foot. Those four numbers are close together, which tells you Petersfield is small enough that the choice of transport barely matters for getting into town. A doctor's surgery is about 7 minutes by car, 12 on foot and 11 by public transport. A food shop is about 8 minutes' walk or 7 by car. Employment centres are about 5 minutes by car and 22 by public transport. The hospital is the exception: about 28 minutes by car and about 56 by public transport. Those public transport times come from 2019 services, and some of those services have since been cut, so trust the car and walking figures more.
The bus figures below are current rather than modelled. On a weekday, the average stop has about 43 scheduled departures, with about 4 an hour at peak. Of the 69 stops with timetable data, about 55% have any weekend service at all. That makes it a weekday service. On a Sunday, walk or drive.
Broadband is good. Gigabit connections reach about 83% of premises, superfast about 99%, and no postcode falls below the minimum speed everyone is legally entitled to request. This is why home working is the town's second most common way of getting to work, not the station.
Mobile coverage is complete: about 100% of the area gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and about 99% from all of them. It is a non-issue.
Road noise is worth checking. Official noise mapping treats 65 decibels as the level where road noise becomes significant, and about 100% of postcodes sit near a road mapped at or above it, with the loudest band reaching 75 decibels. Rail noise is separate: about 40% of postcodes sit near track mapped at 65 decibels or more, with a maximum of 65 decibels. How any of that sounds depends on the house, which window the bedroom faces and how good the glazing is, so visit on a weekday at rush hour, not on a Sunday afternoon.
There are 5 public charge points in the area, with 9 connectors between them, and 2 of those connectors are rapid. With two rapid connectors, charging is something you plan around rather than something you do while buying bread.
In practice, the typical commute in Petersfield is a drive or no commute at all, with the station available for the occasional trip to London. Connectivity here is middling: excellent broadband and a proper main-line station, undermined by buses that barely run at weekends and a hospital nearly half an hour away by car.