Weston-super-Mare is better connected than a town this far down the coast has any right to be. It has its own mainline railway station and three more within reach. Buses run from close to seven hundred stops. Gigabit broadband reaches most of the town. The catch is that almost nobody uses the trains to get to work, because Weston, like most of the seaside, runs on the car.
Rail is the real asset, even if the commute figures ignore it. The town has stations at Weston-super-Mare, Worle and Weston Milton, with Yatton a little further out, and the main one puts you on direct trains to Bristol and London without changing. For all that, only about one resident in a hundred commutes by train, which says more about where the jobs are than about the timetable. The line is there when you want a day in a city or a run to the capital. Most people just don't use it to clock in.
Buses are plentiful on paper and lightly used in practice. There are getting on for seven hundred stops scattered across the town and the villages around it, so a route is rarely far from the door. Even so, only about two in a hundred people take the bus to work. The network runs for the people who need it rather than the people who choose it, which is the honest state of a lot of English bus travel.
Broadband is the quiet standout. Gigabit-capable lines reach about eighty-five percent of the town, and near enough everywhere can get a superfast connection, so the sizeable share of residents now working from home landed somewhere that can actually carry the video calls. For a town whose fortunes were built on Victorian day-trippers, the best connection it now offers is the one down the phone line.
For getting about day to day, the pattern is plain. Over half the town drives to work, and a typical trip into the centre by car runs to about twelve minutes. Walking and cycling take a modest share between them, and nearly a quarter of workers now skip the journey altogether by staying home. This is a car-first town with a rail bolt-on, and it behaves like one.
The verdict is a good one with an asterisk. Weston is well connected for a coastal town, with proper mainline rail, dense bus coverage and strong broadband, and the only reason it might not feel that way is that most residents reach for the car keys regardless.