Poorly, unless you count the car, which is what everyone here counts. Half the households keep two or more vehicles. A third of workers do not commute at all. The train is something that happens to other villages. Timsbury has not solved its transport problem so much as rearranged its life until the problem stopped coming up.
There is no station. The village had one once, a halt on the line that replaced the old coal canal in the early 1900s, and Radford and Timsbury Halt is now a piece of local history rather than a travel option. Fewer than one commuter in a hundred travels to work by train. Buses do better than the reputation of rural Somerset would suggest, with 20 stops in the area, though only around 2% of commuters use one to get to work.
What the village actually does is drive. Around 53% of residents commute by car, and about 33% work from home, which between them account for the overwhelming majority of working adults. Roughly 5% walk to work and about 1% cycle. Car ownership follows: around 51% of households run two or more vehicles, and only about 10% have none at all. In a place where a tenth of households are car-free, being the tenth is a lifestyle rather than a default.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times for the area put the nearest town centre at about 17 minutes by car, roughly 35 minutes by public transport, around 31 minutes by bicycle and about 81 minutes on foot. That last figure is the honest one: the town centre is not walkable, and anyone telling you otherwise has not tried it with shopping. These are modelled figures for the area rather than a route from any particular front door, and the public transport times date from 2019, so treat them with more caution than the car and walk numbers.
The same statistics put a doctor's surgery at roughly 7 minutes whether you drive, walk or take public transport, and a food store at about 7 minutes on foot or 6 by car. Everyday life, in other words, is genuinely close. A hospital is the outlier at around 26 minutes by car and roughly 68 minutes by public transport. Employment centres come out at about 55 minutes by car against roughly 24 by public transport, which is one of those modelled results that looks upside down and reflects where the modelled destinations sit rather than any route a resident would recognise.
On the buses themselves, and these figures are current rather than modelled, the 17 stops with published service data average 58 scheduled departures each on a weekday, with about three buses in the peak hour. Every one of those stops has some weekend service. That is a real service rather than a token one, and it is more than most villages this size get. It is still three buses in the hour you most want them.
Broadband is adequate at the bottom and thin at the top. Superfast reaches about 95% of premises, but gigabit connections are available to only around 25%. Nothing in the village falls below the universal service obligation, so nobody is stuck on a connection the government considers unusable. If your work depends on uploading large files, check the specific address rather than the village.
Mobile is the quiet success story. Every premises in the area gets fourth or fifth generation coverage from at least one operator, and around 99% get it from all of them.
One thing to raise before a viewing: road noise. Official noise mapping puts about 99% of the village's postcodes at or above the 65-decibel threshold, the level at which road noise is treated as significant, with the loudest band present reaching 75 decibels. That is a striking figure for a village on a plateau and it deserves a walk past the property at rush hour rather than on a Sunday morning. Rail noise, by contrast, registers nowhere, for the obvious reason.
Connectivity is the weakest thing about Timsbury by a distance. The car works, the bus is respectable for a village, and everything else on the list is either absent or ordinary.