Badly by train, decently by everything else. Wells is a cathedral city with no railway station, which is a strange thing to say about a place that has a bus station. Nearly half of working residents drive. About a third never leave the house to work at all. The buses run more often than the countryside around them would suggest, and the broadband is better than the buses.
The rail situation is self-inflicted rather than geographical. Wells once had three stations serving three separate railways. Priory Road closed to passengers in 1951, Tucker Street went under the Beeching cuts in 1963, and goods traffic finished the year after. The commuting share by train now rounds to zero. What remains is the bus station on Princes Road and 70 bus stops across the area, carrying about 2% of commuting journeys.
The way people here get to work is a driving story with a large home-working footnote: about 47% drive, roughly 31% work from home, about 14% walk, and about 2% each cycle or take the bus. About 18% of households have no car, while roughly 37% run two or more. That is the split you get in a place where the shops are walkable and the jobs are not.
On the Department for Transport's modelled journey times for the area, the nearest town centre is about 8 minutes by car, about 10 by bicycle, about 14 on foot and about 13 by public transport. Those are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door. The walk figure is the one worth noticing: the centre of Wells is on foot from most of Wells, which a bypassed market town cannot always claim.
The same statistics put a food store about 7 minutes' walk or about 6 minutes' drive away, a doctor's surgery about 8 minutes by car, about 15 by public transport and about 19 on foot, and employment centres about 13 minutes by car against about 50 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier that should shape an actual decision: about 51 minutes by car, and about 94 by public transport. Distances to fixed destinations hold their value over time, but the public transport figures in that set were modelled in 2019, and rural timetables age faster than roads do, so read them as the optimistic version.
Current bus data is more cheerful than the modelling. Across the 58 stops with service information, the average stop sees about 121 scheduled departures on a weekday and about eight in the peak hour, and roughly 97% of stops have some weekend service. Those are departures counted rather than routes, which matters, because a stop with two buses a day is signage rather than a service. Wells clears that bar comfortably.
Broadband is the strongest part of the case. Gigabit service reaches about 70% of premises and superfast about 98%, with no premises falling below the universal service obligation minimum. In a city where roughly a third of workers are at a desk in a spare bedroom, that counts for more than a timetable does.
Mobile coverage is close to universal, with fourth and fifth generation service reaching about 100% of the area from at least one operator and about 97% from all of them, so whichever network you already pay for will most likely work.
Road noise is more pervasive than the postcard suggests. Effectively all of the area's postcodes, about 100%, sit near or above the 65-decibel threshold that official noise mapping treats as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise registers at nothing at all, for reasons covered above. None of that predicts how any particular house sounds with the windows shut.
For electric cars, the area has 8 public charge points between them offering 21 connectors, of which 2 are rapid. Two rapid units is charging you schedule, not charging you do while buying cheese.
Connectivity is the softest part of the argument for Wells: no train in either direction, a bus network that does more than it has to, a hospital run of the better part of an hour, and a broadband connection quietly compensating for the lot.