Woodstock is poorly connected for anyone who needs a train, and fine for anyone who owns a car. The town's own station shut generations ago. Barely anyone takes a train to work. The buses run often, and few people use them. Fibre broadband has done more for the commute than anything on wheels.
The nearest stations are all out of town, at Hanborough, Combe, Tackley and Oxford Parkway, and at the 2021 Census under 1% of working residents took the train to work. Woodstock once had a line of its own, run privately by the Duke of Marlborough before the Great Western took it over, until the final train left on 27 February 1954. The town has 20 bus stops, and about 4% of workers commuted by bus. The western end of the old line is now New Road, so the only rail journey left in Woodstock is driving down a former track to get home.
Census 2021 shows how Woodstock really gets to work. Just under half of working residents worked from home, a count taken while the pandemic was still keeping people indoors. About 35% drove, about 8% walked and about 2% cycled. About 13% of households have no car, and about 40% have two or more.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics, modelled averages for the area, put the nearest town centre about 8 minutes away by car, 10 by public transport, 10 by bike and 14 on foot. A GP is about 8 minutes by car, 14 on foot and 11 by public transport, and a food store about 13 minutes' walk or 7 by car. The nearest hospital is about 29 minutes away by car and 52 by public transport, and the nearest employment centre about 6 minutes by car and 12 by public transport. The distances do not change, but the public transport times date from 2019 and services have been cut since, so they are the figures most likely to have aged badly. Almost everything daily is within a quarter of an hour. The hospital is the one trip that needs planning.
The buses themselves are frequent. The eight stops with timetable data average about 219 scheduled departures each weekday and about 10 an hour at peak, and 100% of them have some weekend service. Those are counts of departures and say nothing about routes, but by rural Oxfordshire standards it is a proper service, used by about 4% of commuters. Woodstock has the buses and kept the car.
Broadband is the strong suit. Superfast broadband reaches 100% of premises, ultrafast about 81% and gigabit about 74%. Mobile coverage is complete, with some 4G or 5G signal everywhere and every network across about 99% of the town.
Road noise is the price of that through-traffic. All of Woodstock's postcodes are near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band recorded reaches 75 decibels. That figure says which postcodes are exposed, not how loud any particular bedroom will be, so visit the house at the morning rush to hear it for yourself. Rail noise reaches no postcode at all. The closure in 1954 left the town one source of noise fewer.
For electric cars there are three public charge points in the area with eight connectors between them, and none is rapid. Charging here gets planned in advance, and nobody tops up in the time it takes to buy a loaf.
In practice a Woodstock commute means a car, a bus or the home office, and the train is a drive away. Connections are poor unless the router counts as transport.