What "good transport links" actually means

"Excellent transport links" appears in almost every London property listing ever written. It is not a lie, exactly. It is just a phrase with no agreed meaning, applied to a city where the actual variation is enormous.

Count the Tube, Overground and National Rail stations within a kilometre of the average postcode in each borough and the spread looks like this:

City of London records 15.1 Tube, Overground and rail stations (1st highest of 33) against Havering records 0.5 Tube, Overground and rail stations. Both can be described as well connected. Only one of them means you can leave the house without checking a timetable.

Three different things wearing the same phrase

When a listing says good transport links, it is usually claiming one of three things, and they are not interchangeable.

Proximity. A station is close. This is what the count above measures, and it's the one people check first — often the only one they check.

Frequency. Trains turn up often enough that you don't plan around them. A Zone 1 Tube platform at 8am and an outer-London rail station with two trains an hour are both "a station five minutes away", and they run your life very differently.

Choice. More than one line goes more than one place. This is the one that gets undervalued at viewings and then dominates daily life. A single line means one signal failure is the difference between a normal Tuesday and a two-hour commute.

Buses are the part everyone skips

Station counts get all the attention because stations are easy to picture. Now look at bus routes serving nearby stops:

The ordering is broadly the same — the centre wins again. What's different is the spread. Stations vary about thirtyfold between the best and worst borough. Bus routes vary less than fourfold.

That is the useful fact. Rail access in London is wildly unequal; bus access is merely unequal. If you are looking at somewhere with almost no stations, the bus network is very likely still there, and it is doing much more of the work than the Tube map implies. It's slower and far less legible to newcomers, but it goes where the rail network doesn't — hospitals, retail parks, schools, the next town over — and for a great many journeys it is the honest answer.

Havering is the clearest case: near the bottom of London for stations, mid-table for bus routes. Bexley and Bromley tell a similar story. Judge any of them on the station count alone and you will conclude they are cut off, which is not what living there is like.

What actually settles it

None of these counts is the thing you care about. The thing you care about is how long it takes to get to the places you go, which depends on where you work, where your family is, and what time you travel — none of which a borough average knows.

Which is why the score for transport in AreaScore is only ever a starting point, and why the app also lets you plan a real journey from a specific postcode to a specific destination using live TfL data. A number tells you whether an area is broadly well connected. A journey time to your actual office tells you whether you should live there.

The map has station and bus figures for all 33 boroughs and 283 postcode districts, if you want to see where a place sits before you go any further, and each borough has its own page with both figures ranked against the other 32.