Every listing near a railway line says it. Moments from the station. Superbly located for the station. A short stroll to the station. Sometimes there's a number attached, which feels more honest, and mostly isn't.

Nobody has to define any of it. So the phrase carries no information at all, and the number carries less than you think. What follows is what to measure instead, and where to get it free.

Nobody has to define it

There's no standard for "near". There's no standard for "moments", "a short stroll", or "excellent transport links". An agent writing those words isn't breaking a rule, because there's no rule to break.

That's not an accident of drafting, it's the current state of play. The National Trading Standards material information guidance that agents worked to was withdrawn after the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 replaced the regulations underneath it. MHCLG ran a consultation on replacement guidance between 6 October and 29 December 2025, saying it intends "to produce new guidance that indicates what is likely to be considered material information". As at September 2026 that guidance hasn't been published. So the honest position is that there is no checklist an agent is failing, which is a wider pattern in how listings get written.

The number is a different problem. A distance is a distance. It isn't a walk time, and it was measured to the station rather than to the bit of the station you can actually get into.

A distance isn't a walk time

TfL publishes what it assumes about walking, and it's worth knowing because it sets your expectations against theirs.

Its journey planner offers three walking speeds: slow is 3km/h, average is 4km/h, fast is 5km/h. The Legible London street maps, the ones with the five and fifteen minute circles on them, assume 1.3 metres per second. Do that arithmetic and the five minute circle is about 390 metres.

So the rough convention buyers carry around, that 400m is a five minute walk, is roughly right. On flat, direct, unobstructed ground, walking at a decent clip, with nothing in your hands.

Which is not the walk. The walk has a dual carriageway with one signalled crossing 200m off your line. It has a hill. It has a cut-through that's on the map and locked at night. It has a station entrance on the far side of the tracks from you, so the last 100m of the distance figure costs you four minutes on a footbridge. It has, twice a week, two bags of shopping.

The fix is free and takes a minute: plan the journey with the walking speed set to slow, and look at the route on a satellite view rather than a street map. You're looking for the crossings and the severances, the things a straight distance can't see.

Station to station isn't door to door

"Twenty minutes to Liverpool Street" is almost always platform to platform. Your commute is none of those twenty minutes plus all of them.

Door to door is the walk at your end, the wait, the ride, every interchange including the walking inside it, and then the walk at the other end that no listing has ever mentioned. It routinely runs half again as long as the advertised figure, and sometimes double.

Plan it from the property's postcode to your actual destination postcode, on a weekday, at the hour you'd really leave. Then do it in the other direction, because the evening service is often not the mirror of the morning one. Nookaly does this part automatically for listings it scores, working out real door to door times with the changes and walking legs included, but the free journey planners will tell you the same thing if you feed them the right postcodes.

Frequency decides more than distance

Two flats, both a ten minute walk to a station. One station has twelve trains an hour, the other has two. Those are not the same flat, and no distance figure will ever tell them apart.

This is the measurement most people skip, and it's the one that decides whether you enjoy living somewhere. Frequency is what turns a commute from a schedule you organise your morning around into a thing you just walk out and do. It's also where branch lines hide: the station is on the map, but half the trains through it go the other way, and the pattern thins outside the peak.

Open the actual timetable, not the journey planner result. Count the departures in the hour you'd travel. Then find the last service home on a weeknight and decide whether you can live with it, because that number quietly sets your curfew for the next ten years.

The official measure, and what it admits it misses

London has a free official version of this, and hardly any buyer knows it exists.

It's called PTAL, Public Transport Accessibility Level, and TfL publishes it through a tool called WebCAT. It scores every 100m by 100m square of London on a scale from 1a, extremely poor access, to 6b, excellent. TfL's own description of what goes into it is short: PTAL values "are influenced by the walking distance to nearby stations and stops, and by the frequency of services at these stations and stops."

Walk time and frequency. The two things this post has just spent 600 words on. Planners have been scoring London on exactly those since long before it occurred to anyone to put it in a listing.

The more useful part is what TfL says it leaves out. The method does not account for:

The speed or utility of accessible services; Crowding, including the ability to board services; or, Ease of interchange.

Read that again, because it's the most honest sentence written about transport connectivity anywhere. The official score doesn't know whether the trains go anywhere you want to go. It doesn't know whether you can get on one. It doesn't know that your interchange is a six minute walk in a tunnel.

Two caveats before you go and look yours up. TfL is clear that WebCAT "is not designed to reflect live travel conditions. It provides a consistent baseline for planning processes", so use it to compare two addresses against each other, not to plan a Tuesday. And it's London only. Everywhere else you do this by hand, which is most of what the checklist below is for.

The thing that isn't on any map: stairs

Step-free access is patchy in a way that surprises people, and it's invisible in every listing.

94 Tube stations have step-free access, which TfL describes as more than a third of the network's 270. More than 60 London Overground stations do, and all 41 Elizabeth line stations are step free from street to platform. All DLR stations and tram stops are step free.

The distinction that catches people out is that step free to the platform isn't level access onto the train. TfL puts it plainly: step-free projects "don't always create level access between the platform and the train", and where there's a gap the answer is a portable ramp positioned by staff, or a raised hump on part of the platform.

If that sounds like someone else's problem, give it five years. Buggies, a suitcase every other week, a knee that goes, a parent who visits. It's cheap to check now and impossible to fix later.

What to do about it

Name the three places you actually go weekly. Not "central London". The office postcode, the school, the parents. Everything else is a rounding error you'll make twice a year.
Plan each one door to door, both directions, from the property's postcode at the hour you'd genuinely travel, on a weekday. Set the walking speed to slow. Then add ten minutes, because you'll leave late and the lift will be busy.
Count trains per hour in the actual timetable for your actual time, and find the last service home on a weeknight.
Look at the walk on a satellite view. Main roads, crossings, footbridges, which side of the tracks the entrance is on, whether the shortcut is a real right of way.
Check step-free status if it will ever matter to you, and check whether it goes to the platform or to the train.
In London, look up the PTAL for the address on WebCAT, and use it to compare shortlisted addresses rather than to judge one on its own.
Then walk it. A wet Tuesday at 8am, carrying what you'd actually carry. Nothing above survives contact with that, which is rather the point, and the same is true of everything else you can only learn by standing there.

The honest summary

"Near a station" is a phrase nobody has to define and nobody can hold anyone to. The distance under it is real but it's a distance, not a walk, and the journey time attached to it is platform to platform rather than door to door. What actually decides whether a commute is liveable is the walk at both ends, how often the trains run at your times, and how much of the journey you spend standing.

All of that is free to check and takes about twenty minutes per property. Which is less time than you'll spend on the commute itself in a single week.

This is general information, not advice on any specific property. Figures are as at September 2026. TfL's journey planner walking speeds and the Legible London 1.3m/s assumption come from a TfL Freedom of Information response dated 13 May 2025. Step-free station counts and the PTAL and WebCAT descriptions are TfL's own, checked on the day of writing. PTAL covers Greater London only. TfL fares changed on 1 March 2026 and are set separately from anything described here.