Not very, unless you count the car, in which case perfectly well. There is no railway station. Almost nobody here commutes by train or bus, and it is not because they are all cycling. Half the households have two cars or more, and roughly a third of working residents never leave the house at all. Ringwood is a driving town with excellent broadband, which is a modern kind of connected and a very old kind of stranded.
Rail is the blunt part. The station closed in 1964 when the line through the town shut, and a 2009 report on expanding rail access recommended rebuilding part of the line from Brockenhurst to Ringwood, which tells you how long the idea has been sitting on a shelf. Under 1% of working residents commute by train, which is what happens when the nearest platform requires a car journey first. Buses exist, with 54 stops across the area, and under 1% of people use them to get to work.
The Census commute mix explains the town better than any timetable. About 54% drive to work and roughly 31% work from home, which between them account for the overwhelming majority of working residents. Around 8% walk and 2% cycle. About 15% of households have no car at all, and 49% have two or more. This is not a place where people gave up the car reluctantly. It is a place where they bought a second one.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times for the area, which describe the area generally rather than a route from any particular front door, put the nearest town centre at around 9 minutes by car, 12 by bicycle, 18 by public transport and 23 on foot. Those are respectable numbers by rural standards. The gap between 9 and 18 is the whole argument for keeping the car.
Broadband is where the town quietly wins. Around 99% of premises can get superfast, roughly 65% can get gigabit and the same 65% can get ultrafast, with no premises sitting below the universal service obligation. For a market town on the edge of a national park, that is a better connection to the outside world than the roads provide.
Mobile coverage is close to complete, with fourth and fifth generation service reaching around 100% of the area from at least one operator and about 99% from all of them.
On everyday destinations, the same modelled journey times give a doctor's surgery at roughly 8 minutes by car, 13 by public transport and 15 on foot, and a food store at about 7 minutes by car and 10 walking. Employment centres sit around 18 minutes by car and 20 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier at about 26 minutes driving and 50 by public transport, with the walking figure capped at two hours, which is the statistics office's way of saying do not walk. These figures date from 2019, and while distances to fixed places do not move, bus services have been withdrawn across the country since then, so treat the public transport numbers with more suspicion than the car ones.
Current bus data is less flattering than the stop count suggests. Across the 51 stops with service information, the average is about 13 scheduled departures on a weekday and 0.4 buses in the peak hour. Around 73% of stops see some weekend service. A stop with no peak-hour departure is street furniture rather than a commuting option.
Road noise is unusually widespread. Around 100% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise does not register at all, for reasons already covered.
Electric vehicle charging is thin. There are 5 public charge points in the area offering 12 connections between them, of which 1 is rapid. Charging here is something you plan around rather than something you do while picking up milk.
Connectivity is the most ordinary thing about Ringwood: fine if you drive, genuinely good if your work arrives down a fibre line, and awkward if you were hoping to manage without either.