Salisbury is well connected on paper, and its residents have quietly opted out of most of it. Two railway lines cross at a single station in the middle of the city. Buses reach almost every stop at weekends. Nearly every premises can get gigabit broadband. Almost nobody commutes by train, and the car does the rest. The infrastructure is here. The habits went elsewhere.
Salisbury Rail Station is the crossing point of two lines, which gives the city direct trains towards London and Exeter on one and Bristol, Bath, Southampton, Portsmouth and Cardiff on the other. That is a genuinely useful set of destinations for a place this size, and 1% of residents commute by train. There are 406 bus stops across the area, used by 4% of commuters. Somewhere in those two sentences is the entire British public transport problem, rendered in miniature.
What people actually do is drive or stay in. Around 43% commute by car, 30% work from home, 14% walk and 3% cycle. About 21% of households have no car at all, while 35% run two or more, which is a city split fairly neatly between people who can manage without one and people who own a spare. The walking share is the number that says most about the shape of the place: a city where one in seven commuters gets to work on foot is a small city, whatever the cathedral is doing to the skyline.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre at about 11 minutes by car and 17 by public transport, 14 by bicycle and 28 on foot. These are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door, and the public transport figures date from 2019, so services may have moved since. The car and walk times age better than the bus ones.
The same source puts a doctor's surgery at about 9 minutes by car, 15 by public transport and 22 on foot, a food store at roughly 7 minutes by car and 8 on foot, and employment centres at around 10 minutes by car and 11 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier at about 16 minutes by car, 32 by public transport and 57 on foot. That last figure is the finding rather than a curiosity. Nobody walks an hour to a hospital, so for anyone without a car the hospital trip is a bus timetable question, and a 2019 bus timetable question at that.
On current service rather than modelled times, 344 stops carry published service data, averaging 85 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 6 buses an hour at peak. Around 94% of stops have some weekend service. Those are departures rather than routes, which matters: a stop with a service running past it all day is a different proposition from a stop with two buses and a lot of optimism, and here most stops are the former.
Broadband is the genuine standout. Gigabit is available to 97% of premises, superfast to 99%, and no premises at all sit below the universal service obligation. For mobile, 100% of the area has coverage from at least one operator and 98% from all of them, so the network choice is unlikely to be the thing that decides where you live.
Electric vehicles are where the infrastructure has not caught up. The area has 25 public charge points with 44 connectors between them, of which 6 are rapid. Six rapid units across a whole city makes charging something you plan around rather than something you do while getting the shopping in.
One caveat worth knowing before viewing. On official noise mapping, effectively every postcode in the area, 100% once rounded, falls near or above the 65-decibel threshold at which road noise is treated as significant, with the loudest band present reaching 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source and affects 32% of postcodes, with the loudest band there reaching 70 decibels. Neither figure predicts what any individual house sounds like with the windows shut, but a compact city ringed by main roads is not a silent one.
Connectivity is a real strength here without being spectacular. The broadband is close to universal and the buses turn up including at weekends, while the railway sits underused by the people who live nearest to it, which is a habit rather than a timetable problem.