St Albans is very well connected, mostly by broadband these days. Two stations serve the city. The buses come every quarter of an hour at peak. Nearly every home can get a gigabit line. More people work from their kitchen table than from any train.
St Albans City and St Albans Abbey stations sit inside the city, with Harpenden, How Wood, Park Street and Bricket Wood a short way out on the surrounding lines. At the 2021 census only about 4% of working residents took the train to work, and about 1% the bus, despite 303 bus stops across the area. For a city whose house prices lean on the London line, the station car park does very little of the lifting at census time.
The census shows how St Albans really works. About 55% of working residents worked from home, about 28% drove, about 7% walked and about 1% cycled. Car ownership is high, with about 37% of households running two cars or more and about 15% running none. The multi-car semi in Marshalswick and the car-free flat by the City station live a mile apart and commute in entirely different centuries.
By the Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics for the area, the nearest town centre is about 10 minutes away by car, 19 by public transport, 14 by bike and 27 on foot. The same statistics put a GP about 9 minutes away by car, 15 by public transport and 21 on foot, and a food store about 8 minutes' walk or 7 minutes' drive. Employment centres come in at about 9 minutes by car and 10 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier, about 26 minutes by car, 53 by public transport and nearly two hours on foot. These are averages modelled in 2019, and the public transport times are the shakiest of the set, because bus timetables have changed since. The road to the hospital has not moved, so the car figure is the one to trust.
The buses run a proper service. The 280 stops with timetable data average about 59 scheduled departures each on a weekday, nearly four an hour at peak, and about 97% of stops have some service at weekends. Those are current figures. For a city of this size that is a bus network, which makes it all the stranger that so few people use it to get to work.
Broadband is close to complete. Gigabit-capable connections are available to about 92% of premises, ultrafast to about 93% and superfast to about 98%, with no premises below the legal minimum, and every postcode has 4G or 5G from every network. The working-from-home figure stopped being surprising the moment the fibre arrived.
Noise is the price of all those roads. On the official noise mapping, close to 100% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which that mapping treats traffic noise as significant, and the loudest band reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source, with about 41% of postcodes near or above the same threshold. The trains most residents no longer catch to work can still be heard from four in ten postcodes. Standing in the garden of any house you are serious about at rush hour, with the windows of the neighbours open, tells you more than the noise map can.
The area has 20 public charging sites with 33 connectors between them, four of them rapid. With four rapid units in a city of this size, charging is something an electric-car owner plans around home and does not leave to chance in town.
St Albans is one of the better-connected places in the county, and its strongest link is the one running into the house, with the station a close second for the days people still go in.