Reasonably well, for a town that has mostly stopped going anywhere. There is a station on the edge of the centre and a busier one next door. Buses run every day of the week. Half the working residents do not commute at all. Reigate is connected enough to leave, and increasingly chooses not to.
Reigate Rail Station sits a short walk north of the town centre, with trains towards London Victoria through Redhill, and westward to Reading via Guildford. Redhill Rail Station, a short hop east, is the junction for the faster London services and for Gatwick Airport. Even so, only about 3% of working residents take the train to work, according to the 2021 Census. The town has 116 bus stops, and about 1% of workers commute by bus.
The real commute mix is short. About 50% of working residents work from home, about 33% drive, about 7% walk and about 1% cycle. The laptop has quietly overtaken the car, and neither the train nor the bus is in the race. About 13% of households have no car, and about 44% run two or more, which is what driveways in a commuter town are for.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, modelled for the area rather than from any particular front door, put the nearest town centre about 10 minutes away by car, 15 by public transport, 12 by bike and 21 on foot. A GP is about 9 minutes by car, 16 by public transport and 20 on foot. A food store is about 10 minutes' walk, or 7 by car. Employment is about 13 minutes by car and 10 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier: about 14 minutes by car and 29 by public transport, and a 51-minute walk that nobody should plan on. The public transport times date from 2019, and services change, so trust the car and walking figures more than the bus ones.
Those bus figures are backed by a current timetable. Each stop averages about 41 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 2 in the peak hour, and every stop with service data gets a weekend service. Two buses an hour at peak is a service you can use without memorising, but it is not one you can build a nine o'clock meeting around without a contingency.
Broadband is the strong suit. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 80% of premises, ultrafast about 81%, and superfast about 98%, with no premises recorded below the universal service minimum. For a town where half the workforce commutes from the kitchen table, that matters more than any timetable. Mobile signal is not a concern either: about 100% of the area gets 4G or 5G from at least one operator, and effectively all of it from every operator.
Road noise is the cost of all that driving. Every postcode in the area sits near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road traffic as significant, and the loudest band recorded is 75 decibels or more. That is a statement about the roads passing through, not a prediction of what anyone hears through a closed window, but it is worth standing in the garden at rush hour before making an offer. Rail noise does not register on the same measure.
Electric-car charging lags behind the broadband. The area has 3 public charge points with 5 connectors between them, and 1 rapid unit. With a single rapid charger, charging in Reigate is something you plan at home on the driveway, not something you do while picking up the shopping.
For a typical working day, the picture is a car for errands, a train for the occasional trip into town, and a fast connection for everything else. Anyone who needs to be in an office daily will lean on Redhill's station more than Reigate's own.
Reigate is better connected than most of its neighbours on the wire and merely decent on the road and rail, which leaves it comfortably above average without ever being a transport town.