Tavistock is well connected by road and by fibre, and that is the whole list. There is no station in the town and effectively nobody commutes by train. Around half the working population drives. A quarter works from home and never goes anywhere at all. This is a town that lost its railways in the 1960s and replaced them with a broadband line and a second car.
Rail is somebody else's problem here. The nearest stations are at Gunnislake, Bere Alston and Calstock, all of them a drive away, and the census records 0.2% of residents commuting by train, which is the statistical way of saying almost nobody. Buses are more real than that without being generous: there are 75 bus stops across the area, and 1% of people use one to get to work.
The commute mix explains the town better than the transport list does. Roughly 53% drive, 26% work from home, 13% walk and 1% cycles. About 15% of households have no car at all, while 39% run two or more. That second figure is the honest one. In a town where the shops are walkable but the jobs, the hospital and the trains are not, the second car is not a luxury purchase. It is infrastructure.
For everyday journeys, the Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre eight minutes away by car, 11 minutes by bicycle, 18 by public transport and 20 on foot. These are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door, so treat them as the shape of the place rather than a timetable.
The same modelling puts a doctor's surgery nine minutes away by car, 20 by public transport and 22 on foot, and a food store eight minutes by car or 16 minutes walking. A hospital is the outlier at 33 minutes by car and 63 by public transport, and employment centres sit 16 minutes away by car against 32 by public transport. Those figures date from 2019, and while distances to fixed destinations do not move, rural bus services since then have, so the public transport numbers deserve more suspicion than the car and walking ones.
Current bus data tells a better story than the journey-time modelling. Across the 68 stops with published timetables, there is an average of 41 scheduled departures on a weekday and around two buses per stop in the peak hour, and 99% of those stops have some weekend service. Weekend coverage that near-complete is unusual for a rural district, and it is departures being counted here rather than routes, which is the number that matters when you are standing at a shelter in February.
Broadband is where Tavistock quietly outperforms places twice its size. Gigabit service reaches 84% of premises, superfast reaches 99%, and nothing at all falls below the universal service obligation. Mobile coverage from at least one operator reaches effectively the entire area, with 91% getting all operators, so the dead-spot problem is about which network you are on rather than whether signal exists.
On noise, 49% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. That is a road-traffic figure attached to the main routes through town. No postcode registers near the threshold for railway noise, for the straightforward reason that there is no railway.
Electric vehicles are the gap. The area has two public charge points offering three connectors between them, and none of them are rapid. Charging here is something you plan around overnight at home, not something you do while picking up shopping.
Connectivity is the middling part of Tavistock's case, and it is middling in a lopsided way: excellent broadband and a functioning bus network sitting on top of no railway and a hospital run that eats an hour by public transport. Buy here on the understanding that the car is doing most of the connecting.