Wantage is middling on connections, a town with buses, broadband and no railway at all. Almost nobody commutes by train. More than a third work from home. Nearly half drive. The car and the fibre line do the work the trains do elsewhere.
There is no railway station in Wantage, and the 2021 Census found under 1% of working residents commuting by train. The town once had its own tramway out to the main line, with its terminus in Mill Street, and one of its locomotives, Shannon, survives in preservation, which is more than the tramway itself managed. Buses do the public transport instead. There are 51 bus stops in the area, though only about 3% of commuters use them to get to work, and buses run to Oxford, Didcot, Abingdon and Faringdon, with night buses to Oxford on Friday and Saturday evenings.
The Census picture of how Wantage gets to work is two-sided. About 45% drive and about 37% work from home, and between them they account for most of the town. About 9% walk and about 2% cycle. About 15% of households have no car, while about 45% have two or more, so the typical household is not choosing between car and bus. It has already chosen the car, twice.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre about 9 minutes away by car, 16 by public transport, 13 by bike and 25 on foot. For a town with its own market place, a 25-minute walk shows how far the newer estates stretch from it.
The same Department for Transport figures, modelled averages for the area, put a GP about 9 minutes away by car, 20 by public transport and 27 on foot. A hospital is about 44 minutes by car and 87 by public transport, which is the number that matters most to anyone without a car. A food store is about 16 minutes' walk or 8 minutes' drive, and employment is about 17 minutes by car and 22 by public transport. The car and walk times hold steady because distances do not move, while the public transport times date from 2019 and bus services have been cut in many places since, so they are the shakiest numbers in the set.
The bus service itself is better than the commute figures suggest. The average Wantage stop has about 53 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 3 in the peak hour, and 86% of stops have some weekend service, on current national timetable data. A town that hardly uses its buses has a fairly decent set of them.
Broadband is the strong suit. Gigabit-capable broadband reaches about 87% of premises in Wantage, superfast about 99%, and no premises fall below the government's minimum service level. Mobile coverage is near complete, with every postcode reached by at least one network and about 95% by all of them. The town that lost its railway now carries a good deal of its commute down a cable.
Road noise is widespread on the official noise maps. Almost every Wantage postcode, about 100%, is near or above 65 decibels from road traffic, the level at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded is 75 decibels and above. Rail noise is mapped separately, and it shows the same share of postcodes near the threshold, at the same top band, despite the town having no station. A map that hears a railway Wantage cannot catch a train from is measuring the main line to the north, and how loud any one house is depends on its own walls and windows.
Electric car owners have little to work with. There are 2 public charge points in the area, with 7 connectors between them and no rapid chargers at all. Charging here is something done at home or planned in advance, so for a buyer with an electric car, off-street parking with room for a home charger is the first thing to confirm on the viewing.
For a typical Wantage commuter, that adds up to a car journey, a laptop at home, or a bus that takes longer than either.
Wantage is middling on connectivity, held back by having no railway and saved by its broadband and a bus network that runs more often than the town uses it.