Fine by car, excellent by broadband, essentially non-existent by rail. Steyning had a railway; it closed in 1966 and never came back. About four in ten workers now work from home. Around eight in ten addresses can get gigabit-capable broadband. About 44 percent of workers drive to their jobs. The town has quietly rebuilt its connectivity around fibre rather than steel rails, and mostly gets away with it.
There is no railway station in Steyning. There used to be one: the Steyning Line ran from London to Shoreham from 1861 to 1966, and its route now survives as a footpath and cycleway known as the Downs Link. Fewer than one in a hundred workers commutes by train, which is what happens when the nearest station is Shoreham-by-Sea Rail Station, some five or six miles down the road. The bus network is present rather than useful for the daily commute. Around 22 bus stops sit within the town boundary, and about one in a hundred workers commutes by bus. The buses do what buses do in a rural West Sussex market town: they run for the shoppers and the schoolchildren, not for the office workers who need to be somewhere by nine.
Broadband is where the town outperforms most towns of its size. Around 82 percent of addresses can order gigabit-capable fibre, and superfast broadband reaches every address in the town without exception. No postcode falls below the universal service obligation for basic broadband. In a town where the railway went away sixty years ago and stayed away, the arrival of fibre-optic cable has done more for connectivity than any transport scheme the county has proposed since. The four-in-ten home-working share is not accidental. It is the population responding rationally to the infrastructure the town actually has.
For daily movement, the car does the work. Around 44 percent of workers drive to their job. The town centre is roughly a seven-minute drive from the average address, an eleven-minute journey by public transport, or a thirteen-minute walk. The nearest primary schools are within nine minutes by car and about fifteen by public transport. The secondary is nine minutes by car and sixteen by public transport. Walking works for local errands and for the seven percent of workers who walk to their job. Cycling works for the fitness of it and for the Downs Link, which has turned a defunct railway line into decent recreational infrastructure that reaches south toward the coast. Public transport works if your destination happens to sit on a bus route and your timetable happens to align with it. Everything else is a car journey, or a work-from-home day that never leaves the postcode.
The pattern is straightforward once you look at what people actually do. Around 43 percent work from home. Another 44 percent drive. Seven percent walk. One percent take the bus. Zero point seven percent take the train. One point three percent cycle. That's the entire commute picture: this is a town of car-users and home-workers with a small population of walkers and cyclists, and effectively no train commuters at all. Buying here without a car, or without a work arrangement that lets you stay put most days, is buying a problem you will spend the next decade solving.
Two and a half out of five on connectivity, which is the honest arithmetic. The broadband earns five, the rail earns one, and the buses earn one. Steyning is connected in the modern sense of fibre and disconnected in the traditional sense of rails. Whether that's a deal-breaker depends on whether your working life requires you to physically be somewhere else at a specific time on Monday morning.