Totnes is better connected than a town of this size has any business being, provided the place you want to reach sits on a railway line. Direct trains to London from a main line station. About one resident in a hundred actually commutes on them. Nearly four in ten work from home instead. The connection doing the real work here runs down a fibre, not a rail.
Totnes Rail Station sits on the main line between Exeter and Plymouth, with direct trains to London and services running west to Plymouth and Penzance. About 1% of residents commute by train. There are 77 bus stops across the area, and about 2% of commuters use one.
The commute here is mostly not a commute at all. About 37% of working residents do the job from home, about 39% drive, and about 14% walk it. Cycling accounts for about 2%. About 21% of households run no car, while about 31% keep two or more, which is the pattern a place produces when the town itself is walkable and everything beyond it is emphatically not.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre at about 10 minutes by car, 20 by public transport, 15 by bicycle and 31 on foot. Those are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door, which matters in a town built up the side of a hill.
Gigabit broadband reaches about 88% of premises and superfast about 99%, with nothing falling below the universal service obligation. For somewhere this rural that is quietly excellent, and it accounts for the working-from-home share more honestly than any amount of writing about lifestyle and river light.
Mobile coverage reaches about 100% of the area from at least one operator and about 91% from all of them, so whichever network you already resent will probably work.
On the same modelled statistics, a doctor's surgery sits about 9 minutes away by car, 18 by public transport or 28 on foot. A food store is about 8 minutes by car and 19 walking. Employment centres come in around 22 minutes by car and 18 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier at about 28 minutes by car and about 72 by public transport, and that gap is the finding rather than a footnote. Those public transport times were modelled back in 2019, and services have been trimmed in a great many places since, so read them as the optimistic version.
Bus stops are not the same thing as buses. Of the 69 stops with published timetables, the average is about 33 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 1.7 buses in the peak hour, with about 78% of stops seeing any weekend service at all. Thirty-three departures spread across a whole day is a stop you can plan around if your day is flexible, and a stop that will let you down if it is not.
Every postcode in the area sits near a road carrying noise at or above 65 decibels, the point at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, with the loudest band present reaching 75 decibels. Rail noise does not cross that threshold anywhere here. How loud that actually feels indoors depends on the house, the frontage and which way the bedrooms face, none of which the mapping knows or claims to.
There are three public charging locations in the area, six connectors between them, and one rapid unit. A single rapid charger for the whole town makes charging an appointment rather than an errand.
Connectivity here lands squarely in the middle, held up at one end and let down at the other: a main line station and near-universal fast broadband against a bus network that thins out the moment you need it most. If your working life travels by train or fibre, this is a good address. If it depends on catching a bus home at seven in the evening, you are buying a car whether you wanted one or not.