Fairly well, if you have a car and a decent broadband line, and badly otherwise. There are five stations nearby and almost nobody commutes by train. Two in five people work from home. At rush hour the buses come less than once an hour. The Pulborough area is connected the way a farmhouse is: by car keys and a fibre line, and the fibre doesn't reach every house yet.
Pulborough Rail Station sits in the middle of the area, with Billingshurst, Amberley, Arundel and Christs Hospital stations within reach. At the 2021 census only about 1% of workers took the train to work, and under 1% took the bus, even though the area has 324 bus stops. The station gets a lot more admiration than use.
Most people's commute is the walk to the spare room or the drive. About 41% of workers were working from home at the census and about 49% drove. Walking accounted for about 5%. Cars are part of the furniture: about 57% of households have more than one and only about 8% have none. A household with one car here is the one that has to plan its week around it.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, modelled for the whole area rather than from any one front door, put the nearest town centre about 12 minutes away by car, 22 by bike and 32 by public transport. On foot it is about 54 minutes, which rules out walking to town for most errands.
The same statistics give everyday trips. A GP is about 11 minutes by car, 27 by public transport and 40 on foot. A hospital is about 30 minutes by car and 75 by public transport, which is long enough to matter in an emergency. A food shop is about 9 minutes by car or 26 on foot. Getting to a large employment centre takes about 36 minutes by car and about 30 by public transport, one of the few trips where the timetable beats the car. The public transport figures date from 2019, though, and services have been cut since, so trust the car and walking times more.
The bus timetable matters more than the number of stops. Each stop averages 13 scheduled departures on a weekday and fewer than one an hour at peak times. About 69% of stops have any weekend service at all. A bus stop that sees a handful of departures a day is somewhere to wait, not a way to get around.
Broadband varies from street to street. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 52% of premises and superfast about 91%, while about 1% fall below the universal service minimum. For a workforce that spends so much of the week at home, that 52% should be on every buyer's viewing checklist, next to the boiler.
Mobile coverage is fine. About 100% of the area gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator and about 99% from all of them.
Road noise reaches almost everywhere. Virtually every postcode, about 100%, sits near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official noise mapping counts it as significant, and the loudest band in the area reaches 75 decibels. That describes nearby roads, not how loud any particular bedroom will be. Rail noise is not an issue, with no postcodes near the threshold.
The area has 4 public charge points with 7 connectors between them, and only 1 of them is rapid. With a single rapid charger, most electric car owners will be charging on a driveway at home, because charging on the way through will rarely be an option.
Pulborough is better connected than its trains and buses suggest, as long as you drive or work from home. If you do neither, it's a harder place to live.