Not very. Selsey is roughly twenty-four minutes from the nearest town centre by car, forty-five minutes by public transport, and over an hour by bike. The town lost its railway in 1935 and never got it back. Public transport modal share for journeys to work runs in low single digits. The connectivity story is essentially a car-and-broadband story, with a quarter of residents skipping the commute entirely by working from home.
Rail is the headline absence. The line between Chichester and Selsey closed in 1935, and there has been no rail link since. The nearest stations are at Chichester and Bognor, both reached by the only road in and out of the town. Fewer than one in two hundred residents commutes by train, which is what happens when the nearest platform is half an hour away on a good morning. The bus picture is busier in absolute terms. There are around seventy bus stops across the wider area, with the main service running between Selsey and Chichester and a community shuttle covering the outlying parts of the town. Even so, fewer than one in fifty residents uses a bus to get to work. The buses are infrequent enough that most people who can drive, do.
Broadband is the bit of the infrastructure picture that lands well. Three-quarters of premises in the area can get a gigabit connection. Nearly all can get superfast. None fall below the universal service threshold. For a peninsula at the end of a single road, that is a stronger digital position than the road network and the rail history would suggest. Anyone whose work can be done over a video call has the bandwidth to do it, and the quarter of the workforce working from home is the practical evidence that the fibre actually arrived.
In practical terms, life here runs on the car. Over half of residents drive to work. About one in ten walks. A small fraction cycles. A quarter work from home, which is the highest-share commute mode the town has after the car. The drive to the nearest town centre is about twenty-four minutes when the road behaves, and longer when the summer traffic chokes the only route off the peninsula. The nearest secondary school is reachable in under ten minutes by car. The nearest primary school is closer still. For most of life's bigger errands, the car is the only sensible answer, and the broadband is the consolation prize for the journeys nobody wants to make any more.
Selsey lands at two and a half out of five for connectivity, and it lands there because the broadband is good, the rail is gone, and the road is the only show in town. Well connected for anyone whose work is a video call. Poorly connected for anyone whose work is everything else.