Not well, and the town has largely stopped pretending otherwise. There is no main-line station on the peninsula. Nearly half of working residents drive, and a quarter of them work without leaving the house. Buses reach almost every stop at weekends and almost none of them frequently. What rescues the place is that the things people actually need sit within a short walk, which is a different kind of connectivity from the sort that gets you to a city.
Rail here is a heritage operation rather than a commuting one. The preserved line runs through Corfe Castle station and connects to the main line only seasonally, which makes it a genuinely lovely way to travel and a completely useless way to get to an office. Under 1% of working residents commute by train, which is the census confirming what anyone who has tried it already knows. Buses do the real public transport work: 52 stops sit within the town, and about 2% of residents commute by bus.
The commute mix tells the honest story. About 47% of working residents drive, about 24% work from home, and about 19% walk to work, with cycling at about 2%. Roughly 35% of households run two or more cars, while about 20% have none at all. That split matters more than any timetable. A fifth of the town is managing carless, which is possible because of the walking, not because of the buses, and a third of it has decided the answer to the transport question is simply to own another car.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre at about 8 minutes by car, about 11 by bicycle, about 14 by public transport and about 20 on foot. These are modelled figures for the area rather than a route from any particular door, so treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a promise. On this measure the town is compact and self-contained, and the walk time being only slightly worse than the bus time is the finding.
For everyday destinations, the same statistics give about 7 minutes to a food store by car and about 10 on foot, and about 8 minutes to the nearest doctor's surgery by car, about 12 by public transport and about 17 walking. Employment centres come in at about 8 minutes by car and about 46 by public transport, which is the single clearest number on this page. The nearest hospital sits at about 46 minutes by car and about 60 by public transport. That hospital figure deserves attention in a town where the typical resident is in their late fifties. One caution: these journey-time statistics date from 2019, and while distances to fixed places do not move, bus services have been withdrawn across the country since, so the public transport figures should be read with more scepticism than the car and walk times.
Current bus data is less flattering than the stop count suggests. Across the 31 stops with published service information, the average is about 69 scheduled departures on a weekday, but only around 0.7 buses an hour at peak, meaning the average stop does not see one an hour when people are actually travelling. About 97% of stops carry some weekend service, which is unusually good and reflects a town that runs on visitors rather than commuters.
Broadband is the one place the town outperforms its geography. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 73% of premises, superfast about 98%, and no premises fall below the universal service obligation. For a peninsula this remote that is a better result than the roads have ever managed. Mobile coverage is similar: every premise has fourth or fifth generation service from at least one operator, and about 97% have it from all of them.
Road noise is more pervasive than the setting implies. Around 100% of the town's postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, with the loudest mapped band reaching 75 decibels. That is a mapping threshold rather than a prediction about any given bedroom, but it is worth knowing before assuming a coastal town is quiet by default.
Electric vehicle provision is thin. There are 3 public charge points in the area offering 5 connectors between them, and none of them are rapid. Charging here is something you plan around overnight rather than something you do while buying milk.
Connectivity is the weakest thing about this town and the price of everything else on the page. The daily radius works beautifully on foot and falls apart the moment you need to be anywhere else by a fixed time.