Badly, and the town has quietly made its peace with that. There is no railway station, and nobody commutes by train because there is nothing to commute on. A third of residents work from home, which here functions less as a lifestyle choice than as transport policy. Nearly half of households run two cars or more. Salcombe is connected the way a cul-de-sac is connected: perfectly fine once you are in it, a decision every time you leave.
No station, and the share of residents travelling to work by train is zero. Buses do exist. There are 14 stops in the area, and about 0.3% of residents use one to get to work, a figure that survives mainly on rounding.
The commute here is a car and a laptop. About 45% drive to work, about 33% work from home, about 17% walk and about 0.4% cycle. About 45% of households keep two or more cars, and about 15% keep none, which in a town built up the steep west side of an estuary is a meaningfully different decision than it would be on the flat.
The nearest town centre sits about 18 minutes away by car and about 34 minutes by public transport. Same destination, roughly double the time, and only one of those options runs to a timetable somebody else wrote.
Broadband is the one line in this answer pointing the other way. About 96% of premises can get superfast, about 46% can get gigabit, and none fall below the universal service obligation. The fibre turned up more dependably than the buses ever have.
Mobile coverage reaches about 100% of premises from at least one operator and about 91% from all of them.
There are two public electric vehicle charge points in the area.
For most working people this resolves to a simple rule: the car is the commute, or the commute is the spare room. Anyone whose job requires a daily journey off the peninsula should cost the fuel and the hours before they fall in love with a harbour view.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times cover the remaining modes to that nearest town centre: about 18 minutes by car, about 34 by public transport, about 33 by bicycle and about 89 minutes on foot. An hour and a half of walking to reach a town centre is the finding here, not a footnote. All of these are modelled for the area rather than routed from any particular front door.
The same statistics put a general practitioner about 10 minutes away by car, about 19 by public transport and about 31 on foot. A food store is about 7 minutes by car and about 12 on foot. The nearest employment centre is about 7 minutes by car against about 59 by public transport. A hospital is about 58 minutes by car and about two hours by public transport, which is where the modelling stops counting rather than where the journey ends. Distances to fixed places hold their value over time. The public transport figures date from 2019 and services have been withdrawn since, so the car and walking numbers are the solid ones and the bus-based ones are the charitable ones.
Bus stops are not the same thing as a bus service. Ten of the 14 stops carry published service data, averaging about 16 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 1.6 buses in the peak hour. All ten have some weekend service. Sixteen departures counts buses passing a pole, not places you can get to.
One genuine consolation: no postcodes in the area sit near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, and none register for railway noise either. The quiet and the isolation are the same fact wearing different clothes.
Between them the two charge points offer two connectors, and neither is rapid. Charging is something you plan into an evening here, not something you do while picking up milk.
Connectivity is comfortably the weakest thing about Salcombe, and a gigabit line does not compensate for a timetable that thin. The town works beautifully for people who have stopped needing to be anywhere else by nine.