Connected by car, and thin in every other direction. Around two in three working residents drive. Fewer than one in a hundred take the train, in a town with a main line running past it. Two in five households keep more than one car. That last number is the honest description of how the place actually operates.
Rail is physically close and barely used. Par sits on the main line and serves the town, with St Austell, Lostwithiel, Luxulyan and Bugle also within reach, and the town's own station stopped taking passengers back in 1925. Even so, under 1% of working residents commute by train and about 2% by bus. There are 57 bus stops mapped across the area. Stops have never been the problem.
The commute mix says the rest. About 64% drive to work and around 20% work from home, which makes the spare bedroom the second most popular destination in town. About 6% walk and about 1% cycle. Roughly 43% of households run two or more cars and only about 14% have none, which is what a place looks like when the second car is a household appliance rather than a luxury.
The Department for Transport's journey-time modelling puts the nearest town centre at about 16 minutes by car and about 28 by public transport. Those are modelled figures for the area rather than a route from any particular front door.
Broadband is the one piece of infrastructure here that has been fully finished. Gigabit connections reach about 89% of premises, superfast reaches about 99%, and nothing at all falls below the universal service obligation. Mobile is similar: at least one operator covers essentially every premises, and all operators together cover about 95%. For the fifth of the town working from home, the pipe is better than the road.
What that adds up to is a place where the commute is a decision about a car, not a decision about a timetable. Buy here assuming you will use the train and the numbers suggest you will join a very small club.
The same modelling puts the town centre at about 29 minutes by bicycle and about 79 minutes on foot. Nearly an hour and twenty minutes walking is not a walk, it is a statement that walking is not on the menu for that particular trip.
For everyday things the picture improves sharply. A food store is about 7 minutes on foot and about 6 by car. A doctor's surgery is around 7 minutes by car, 12 by public transport and 15 on foot. Employment centres run about 20 minutes by car against 45 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier that should shape a decision: roughly 53 minutes by car and about 64 by public transport, which is a genuinely long way if somebody in the household has a condition that needs regular appointments. All of these are modelled for the area rather than measured from a doorstep, and the public transport figures date from 2019, so treat them with more suspicion than the car and walk times, because services have been withdrawn since and none have been put back.
Bus provision, measured properly, is thinner than 57 stops implies. Across the 53 stops with published service data, the average is about 26 scheduled weekday departures per stop, working out at roughly 1.6 buses per stop in the peak hour. Every one of those stops has some weekend service, which is more than many Cornish towns manage. One bus an hour at the school run is a service you plan your life around rather than one you use casually.
Road noise touches a real slice of the town. About 21% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road traffic as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise, in a town with a working railway depot, does not register on the mapping at that threshold at all.
Connectivity is the middling part of the case for St Blazey, propped up by excellent broadband and undercut by a bus service and a hospital run that both assume you own a car.