Petts Wood is very well connected, and its station is the main reason. Trains go direct to three London terminals. There's a bus stop on almost every corner. Fibre reaches nearly every door. The station is good enough that fewer than one commuter in ten uses it, because many residents found they could work from home instead.
Petts Wood Rail Station has direct trains to London Victoria via Bromley South, to Charing Cross and Cannon Street via Grove Park, and to Kentish Town via Catford, plus services out to Orpington and Sevenoaks. Orpington, St Mary Cray, Chislehurst and Bickley stations are all near enough to be some households' nearest station. At the 2021 census about 10% of working residents commuted by train and about 6% by bus. The area has 311 bus stops.
The rest of the 2021 commute breaks down like this: working from home was the largest group at about 38%, driving followed at 35%, about 5% walked and 1% cycled. About 22% of households have no car and about 33% have two or more. Those two groups live on the same roads and use completely different parts of this answer.
The buses are frequent. Stops average about 167 scheduled departures on a weekday and about nine an hour at peak, and 99% of stops have some weekend service. These are current timetable figures, counted in departures, so they describe how often a bus turns up.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre about 10 minutes away by car, 17 by public transport, 14 by bike and 25 on foot. The same Department for Transport set, modelled in 2019, gives a GP about 7 minutes by car and 10 on foot or by public transport. A food shop is about 8 minutes' walk or 7 by car. Employment is about 14 minutes by car and 11 by public transport. The nearest hospital is about 14 minutes by car, 26 by public transport and 47 on foot. Distances to fixed places like a surgery or a hospital don't change, but bus services have been cut since 2019, so the public-transport times are the least reliable figures here. The modelled times are averages for the whole area, so time the walk from the house you're considering to Petts Wood station at a morning rush hour, because the average says nothing about the house at the far end of a long road.
Gigabit broadband is available to about 97% of premises, ultrafast to the same 97% and superfast to 99%, and no premises fall below the legal minimum service. 4G or 5G from at least one network reaches every postcode, and every network covers almost all of them. The three in ten who work from home have the connections to do it.
Road noise is the price of all those connections. Every postcode in the area is close to a stretch of road mapped at 65 decibels or louder, the level at which official noise mapping counts road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded is 75 decibels and above. Rail noise is a separate source: about 12% of postcodes are near a stretch of railway mapped at 65 decibels or more, again up to 75 and above. The maps show where noise is loud outdoors, not how much reaches anyone's living room.
The area has 8 public electric vehicle charge points with 17 connectors between them, and 4 of those connectors are rapid. A driver here without a home charger will have to plan around those four.
A typical commute here means a short walk or bus ride to a station with several routes into London, and plenty of residents don't need to commute at all. Connections are one of Petts Wood's strongest points, by rail, bus and broadband alike.