Badly, unless you own a car, in which case fine. The train share of commuting here rounds to zero. Buses carry almost nobody. Six in ten people drive to work and more than four in ten households run two cars or more. This is a town that solved its transport problem privately, one driveway at a time.
There is a station with the town's name on it, and it is not in the town. St Columb Road Rail Station sits out on the line in a neighbouring parish, which is why trains account for effectively none of the commuting recorded in the 2021 census. Buses do slightly better at about 2% of commutes, drawing on 20 bus stops across the area. Neither figure is the kind of number a place builds a daily routine around.
What people actually do is drive. About 62% of working residents commute by car, roughly 22% work from home, about 8% walk and around 1% cycles. Only about 10% of households have no car at all, and roughly 45% have two or more. The two-car household is not an indulgence here. It is the infrastructure.
The nearest town centre is modelled at about 24 minutes by car and roughly 39 by public transport, which is the whole argument in two numbers. Doubling your journey time is a price most people will pay once and then never again.
Broadband partly makes up for it. Superfast service reaches about 98% of premises, with no premises sitting below the universal service obligation, so working from home is genuinely viable and the 22% who do it are not doing it on heroics. Gigabit is another matter, reaching about 20% of premises, so the fastest tier remains a minority sport.
Mobile coverage is close to universal, with fourth or fifth generation service from at least one operator at about 100% of the area and from every operator at about 95%. Switching networks to fix a dead spot is not a conversation you will be having often.
For a typical commute, that adds up to a car-first life with a home-working fallback. The car times are workable, the public transport times are the reason nobody uses public transport, and the people who thrive here are the ones who priced in fuel before they priced in the mortgage.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times fill in the rest of the picture, and they describe the area rather than a route from any particular front door. The nearest town centre works out at roughly 24 minutes by car, about 39 by public transport, around 50 by bicycle and a full two hours on foot. That last figure is not a quirk of the modelling. Walking to the nearest town centre is not a thing anyone does.
Closer to home, the same statistics put a doctor's surgery about eight minutes away by car, 14 by public transport, 12 by bicycle and 23 on foot, which is the one everyday journey here that works without a vehicle. A food store is about seven minutes by car and 12 on foot. Employment centres run to roughly 13 minutes by car against 29 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier at about 35 minutes by car and 71 by public transport, which turns a routine appointment into most of a morning. Those modelled figures date from 2019, and while the distances have not moved, the public transport numbers should be read with more caution than the driving ones, because rural services have been cut since.
Current bus data sharpens that. Stops in the area average about 42 scheduled departures across a weekday, which sounds respectable until you look at the peak hour, where the average is zero scheduled buses. About 56% of stops see any weekend service at all. A stop is not a service, and a timetable that gives up before the morning rush is not a commuting option.
On noise, official mapping puts about 69% of postcodes at or near the 65-decibel threshold, the level at which road noise is treated as significant, with the loudest band present reaching 70 decibels. Rail noise does not register anywhere in the area. Road traffic, then, is both how the town connects and what it hears.
Connectivity is the weakest thing about living here, and it is not close. The car works, everything else is a compromise, and the bus timetable is the part nobody warns you about until you need it at eight in the morning.