Stratford is a railway junction with homes built around it. Six in ten households have no car. A third of workers work from home. A typical bus stop gets hundreds of departures on a weekday. Of the everyday places, the hospital is the only one you can't reach quickly.
Stratford (London) station and Stratford International are in the town centre, Maryland covers the eastern side and West Ham the south, with Hackney Wick close by to the north-west. Even so, only about 8% of working residents took the train to work at the 2021 Census, and about 7% took the bus. The area has 254 bus stops. Trains are what Stratford is known for, but few residents use them for the daily commute.
The biggest group didn't commute at all. About 35% worked from home at the Census, 12% drove, 6% walked and 3% cycled. About 60% of households have no car, and only 7% have more than one. The car parks are mostly for the visitors to the shops.
Department for Transport modelling for the area, from 2019, puts the nearest town centre about 8 minutes away by car, 10 by bike, 13 by public transport and 15 on foot. A GP is about 6 minutes on foot or by public transport and 7 by car, and a food shop is about 6 minutes' walk or 7 minutes' drive. The nearest large employment centre is 5 minutes by car and 11 by public transport. The hospital is the exception, at about 12 minutes by car, 27 by public transport and 40 on foot. These are modelled averages for the area. The distances don't change, but the public transport times date from 2019 and are the least reliable of the set, since services have changed since then.
The bus figures are current. The 204 stops with timetable data average about 417 scheduled departures each weekday and about 23 in the peak hour, and 99% of them have some service at the weekend. That counts departures, not routes, but at these numbers no one needs a timetable.
Gigabit-capable broadband reaches about 89% of premises, ultrafast about 93% and superfast about 98%. No postcode falls below the legal minimum broadband speed, and every postcode gets 4G or 5G from all the main mobile networks. For the 35% working from home, a good connection is part of what they're paying for.
The cost of all that traffic is noise. About 80% of Stratford's postcodes are close to or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band in the area reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is mapped separately, and 43% of postcodes are near or above the same 65-decibel line from trains, again peaking at 75. On a viewing, find out which way the bedrooms face, towards the road, the railway or neither.
The area has 71 public charge points with 138 connectors between them, and 5 of those connectors are rapid chargers. With only 5 rapid connectors, most electric car owners here will need to plan their charging around the slower points.
For a typical household, most journeys take a few minutes on foot or a short train ride, and the car comes out mainly for trips to the hospital. Even the steam locomotive Robert, on display in Meridian Square, came back by 2011 after a spell at a railway museum near Colchester.
Stratford is very well connected for anyone who can live with the noise that comes with it.