Stevenage is very well connected, though most of the connections people use don't involve a train. A main-line station is in the middle of town. Gigabit broadband reaches nearly nine in ten homes. Buses run at almost every stop at weekends. About half of all workers still drive.
Stevenage Rail Station has direct trains to London and to Cambridge, with Knebworth, Hitchin and Watton-at-Stone stations close by. Even so, only about 3% of Stevenage's working residents took the train to work at the last census, and about 3% took the bus, from 314 stops across the area. The High Street's coaching inns once kept a steady stream of stagecoaches running through town, but as of February 2026 Stevenage has no scheduled coach service at all, and the new bus interchange's coach stand has nothing to wait for.
At the same census, 49% of workers drove to work and 29% worked from home. About 8% walked and 2% cycled, though the town was built with a full network of cycleways kept separate from the traffic. About 19% of households had no car, and 39% had two or more. The station explains the house price. The car explains how most people get to work.
On the Department for Transport's modelled journey times for 2019, the town centre is about 11 minutes away by car, 19 by public transport, 16 by bike and 32 on foot. Getting to everyday services follows the same pattern: a GP is about 8 minutes by car, 13 by public transport and 15 on foot; a hospital is 14 minutes by car and 32 by public transport; a food shop is about 7 minutes whether you walk or drive. The modelled time to the nearest big employment centre comes out at about 9 minutes by public transport and 29 by car, which shows how differently the model treats a bus route and a road. These are area averages, and the distances will not have changed, but bus services have been cut since 2019, so the public transport times are the least reliable figures in the set.
The current bus timetable looks healthier than the census commute suggests. Each stop averages about 87 scheduled departures on a weekday and about six buses an hour at peak, and 95% of stops have some weekend service. A bus here is a usable service, even though very few people take one to work.
Gigabit broadband is available to about 88% of premises, superfast to 99%, and no premises falls below the legal minimum. Every mobile network covers the whole area. The 12% without gigabit are where it matters, and Ofcom's postcode checker will tell a home worker in a minute whether the house they are viewing is one of them.
Road noise is everywhere. Practically every postcode in Stevenage, 100% once rounded, is near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band present is 75 decibels and up. Rail noise is a separate source: about 24% of postcodes are near or above the same threshold beside the line, also peaking at 75 decibels and up. These are mapped bands for an area, and they say nothing about how loud any particular bedroom will be with the windows shut.
The area has 24 public charge points with 79 connectors between them, 8 of them rapid. Eight rapid units means most electric car owners here will be charging at home, with the rapid chargers as a backup.
Stevenage is one of the better-connected towns around, with a main-line station and fibre to nearly every door, and it still gets to work mostly by car.