Watford is about as well connected as a town outside London gets. Six stations serve the area. Gigabit broadband reaches almost every home. Most bus stops have a bus every quarter of an hour or so through the day. The town has plenty of ways out, and a third of its workers didn't use any of them.
Rail runs right through. Watford Junction sits on the West Coast Main Line, with Watford High Street, Watford North, Garston (Herts), Bushey and Carpenders Park spread around the rest of the area, and the Abbey Line shuttle running from the Junction to St Albans Abbey. The national transport access data counts 575 bus stops in and around the town. Yet at the 2021 Census only about 4% of working residents took the train to work and about 3% the bus. Plenty of trains, then, and not many regular passengers on them.
The commute is a car and a laptop. At the 2021 Census about 40% of working residents drove to work and about 34% worked from home, with about 10% walking and only 2% cycling. About a fifth of households have no car, while about 36% have two or more. In one town, the flat with no car and the semi with two on the drive live on different transport systems.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre about 11 minutes away by car, 19 by public transport, 13 by bike and 25 on foot, averaged across the area. Everything else is close too, on the same department's figures, which are modelled averages built from 2019 timetables, so the bus and train times are the shakiest of the set now that services have changed: a GP is about 8 minutes by car, 13 by public transport and 15 on foot; a food shop about 8 minutes' walk or 7 by car; a large employment centre about 13 minutes by car or 10 by public transport. The hospital is the outlier, about 14 minutes by car and 31 by public transport, a long trip for anyone who doesn't drive.
The buses are proper buses. Across the 486 stops with timetable records, the average is about 65 scheduled departures on a weekday and close to four an hour at the peak, and about 81% of those stops have some service at the weekend.
Broadband is close to complete. About 94% of premises can get gigabit speeds and about 99% superfast, and every postcode gets 4G or 5G from all the operators.
The road and rail noise maps catch almost everybody. Nearly every postcode, about 100% of them, sits near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official noise mapping treats traffic as significant, and the loudest band in the area reaches 75 decibels or more. Rail is a separate source: about 26% of postcodes are near or above 65 decibels from trains, again up to 75 decibels or more at the loudest. For any house close to the main line, stand in the garden while a fast train goes by, since the mapping says nothing about one particular back fence.
The town has 68 public charge points with 188 connectors between them, 12 of them rapid. With twelve rapid units, charging is still something to plan, more than something to do while picking up the shopping.
Watford has also collected a long list of transport plans that never arrived. Direct trains to Paris were floated in 2008, a tram-train for the Abbey Line in 2009, an extended underground link through Cassiobridge in 2013 and a cross-London rail extension in 2014, and each one stalled on money or value. The town is well connected on the strength of what the Victorians built.
For connections, Watford is one of the best-placed towns in the county: frequent trains and buses, fast broadband everywhere, and nearly everything a short drive or bus ride away, with the hospital trip the one to plan for.