Not very, and the town has made its peace with it. There is a station in Saltash, and a string of others strung along the line within a few miles of it. Almost nobody uses them. Half the working population drives to work and a quarter never leaves the house to do it. Connectivity here means the car keys, and everything else is scenery you pass on the way.
Saltash Rail Station sits on the main line, with Plymouth Rail Station and the smaller stops at St Budeaux Ferry Road, St Budeaux Victoria Road, Keyham, Dockyard, Devonport and Bere Ferrers within reach of it, plus St Germans further west. Under 1% of residents commute by train. There are 128 bus stops in the area and about 3% of people use a bus to get to work, which tells you what the network is for and who it is not for.
The commute mix is where the argument actually lands. About 54% of working residents drive, about 25% work from home, about 9% walk and about 2% cycle. Roughly 15% of households have no car at all, while about 39% run two or more. That is a town organised around driveways rather than timetables, and any assumption you bring from a city about doing without a vehicle should be tested here before it is acted on.
Journey times published by the Department for Transport put the nearest town centre about 8 minutes away by car and about 14 minutes by public transport, which is one of the smaller gaps you will see between the two. The gap widens dramatically the further you need to go.
Broadband is the genuine strength and the thing that makes the working-from-home share possible. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 75% of premises, ultrafast the same, and superfast about 98%. Nothing here falls below the universal service floor, so the fibre arrived before the buses did.
Mobile coverage from at least one operator rounds to the whole area, and all operators together reach about 95% of it. There is a single public charge point in the area, with no rapid unit among them.
For a working commute, that adds up to a car-first town with a rail option most people ignore and a bus network that thins out the moment you need it on a Sunday. Direct trains run east and west from the station for anyone determined to use them, but the honest planning assumption for a household moving here is one car minimum and probably two.
Those same modelled journey times, which describe the area rather than a route from any particular front door, put the town centre about 10 minutes away by bike and about 16 minutes on foot. A quarter of an hour's walk into the middle of town is a genuinely good number, and it is the reason the town centre still functions.
The wider journey-time picture is more mixed. A general practitioner surgery sits about 8 minutes away by car, about 14 by public transport and about 15 on foot. A food store is about 7 minutes on foot and about 6 by car, which is close to ideal. Employment centres run about 15 minutes by car and about 19 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier at about 21 minutes by car and about 61 minutes by public transport, and that hour-long figure was modelled in 2019, since when services have been cut rather than added, so treat every public transport number here with more caution than the car and walking ones.
On the buses themselves, the 59 stops with published service data average about 71 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 5 buses in the peak hour, and roughly 71% of stops have any weekend service at all. Departures, not routes, is the honest unit, and a stop with a handful of them is a bus stop rather than a bus service.
On noise, around 35% of the town's postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the threshold at which official mapping treats traffic noise as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. That is a third of the town living within earshot of a road that the mapping considers loud, which is worth checking at the specific address rather than assuming.
Electric charging is where the town has simply not started. One public charge point, one connector, no rapid units. Charging here is something you plan around at home rather than something you do while picking up milk.
Connectivity is the weakest thing about Saltash, and the trains sitting unused a short walk from the town centre make it more frustrating rather than less. Come here with a car, a broadband contract and no illusions, and the town works perfectly well.