Torquay is superbly connected to the internet and moderately connected to everywhere else. There are two railway stations in the town and almost nobody commutes from either. Half the working population drives. A quarter of households run no car at all. The fibre arrived long before the timetable caught up, and that mismatch is the whole answer in one sentence.
The rail provision looks better on a map than it performs in practice. Torquay Rail Station sits near the sea by Torre Abbey Sands, Torre Rail Station a little inland on the Newton Abbot road, and not every train bothers stopping at the second one. Roughly 1% of working residents commute by train. Buses do more work, with 398 stops across the area, though only 4% of people use one to get to work.
What actually happens each morning is a car. Around 51% of working residents drive, 20% work from home, 15% walk and 1% cycles. The car ownership figures fill in the rest: about a quarter of households have no car, while 29% have two or more. That is a town split cleanly down the middle between people for whom the hills are a walk and people for whom they are a second parking space.
For the nearest town centre, the Department for Transport's modelled journey times put it at 8 minutes by car, 14 by public transport, 11 by bicycle and 17 on foot. Those are averages calculated for the area rather than a route from any particular door, and in a place built on slopes the walking figure will feel different depending on which way home is.
Broadband is the standout. Gigabit connections reach 82% of premises and superfast reaches 96%, with nothing at all falling below the legal minimum service. Mobile is equally settled, with all four operators covering essentially every premise rather than one lonely mast doing the work.
The everyday errands hold up on the same modelled figures. A doctor's surgery is around 8 minutes by car, 14 by public transport and 16 on foot. A food store is about 7 minutes whether you drive or walk, which is the single most useful number here. The main employment centre is roughly 13 minutes by car and 12 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier at 14 minutes by car against 30 by public transport, and that public transport figure dates from 2019, before a decade of service reductions that nobody has remodelled since. Treat the car and walking times as solid and the bus-based ones as optimistic.
On the buses themselves, the average stop sees 34 scheduled weekday departures, which works out at about two buses in the peak hour, and 78% of stops have some kind of weekend service. That is a real network rather than a token one, but two departures in the busy hour is a service you plan your day around rather than one you turn up and use.
Noise is the tax on all that road use. Around 25% of postcodes sit at or near 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping starts treating road traffic as significant, and the loudest band mapped in the town reaches 75 decibels. No meaningful rail noise registers anywhere. The through-routes carry the burden, which is worth knowing before you fall for a bay window on a main road.
Electric cars are the thin bit. There are 5 public charge points in the area offering 9 connectors between them, of which 2 are rapid. Charging here is something you schedule rather than something you do while picking up a loaf.
Connectivity comes out better than average without ever being a selling point: excellent broadband, a usable bus network, quick local errands, and a railway that most residents treat as something tourists use. Keep the car, enjoy the fibre.