Describe the audience, service area, and decision. Makeform turns that brief into a transportation survey about origins, destinations, schedules, modes, costs, barriers, accessibility, and alternatives for a city, school, or workplace.
Send transportation survey responses to Google Sheets, Slack, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for the transportation survey builder
Choose a scenario, revise its details, and send the prompt to the Makeform builder. Each example shows a practical survey structure, not a live result.
Audience
Residents, workers, and visitors traveling within a city
Format
Multimodal needs survey with neighborhood and route questions
Prompt size
610 chars
Example survey structure
Multimodal needs survey with neighborhood and route questions
What area does your usual trip begin and end in?
Which travel modes do you use in a typical week?
When do you usually need to arrive?
Which barriers make this trip difficult?
Rank the transportation improvements you value most
Suggested analysis tags
Current commute
Unmet need
Potential mode shift
Ask about the trip people actually make, including days, arrival time, transfers, and barriers. A broad question about preferred transportation rarely gives planners enough detail to change a route or program.
Step 1
Define
name the audience and transportation decision
Step 2
Measure
collect current trips, timing, cost, and barriers
Step 3
Compare
segment needs by mode, place, and schedule
Step 4
Act
prioritize routes, programs, and facilities
Questions that lead to decisions
Connect current travel with the time, place, and constraint behind each trip. That detail separates a popular idea from an improvement people can use.
Show route and transfer questions to bus riders, parking questions to drivers, and path questions to walkers or cyclists. Every mode still feeds shared comparison fields.
Ask how often the trip occurs, when someone must arrive, and how flexible that time is. An early shift points to a different response than a midday trip.
Distinct barrier, satisfaction, and willingness questions show what blocks a mode and whether a specific change could remove that block.
Built around your audience
Start with the group you need to understand, then adapt geography, schedules, modes, and improvement choices to its decisions.
Collect approximate origins and destinations, trip purposes, available modes, safety concerns, and priorities for streets or transit.
Compare morning and afternoon travel, bus use, caregiver schedules, active-travel conditions, after-school needs, and accommodations without unnecessarily identifying a child.
Connect worksite, shift, on-site frequency, and commute mode with interest in transit passes, shuttles, carpool matching, bike facilities, or flexible schedules.
Ask where riders board, when they travel, which transfers matter, and how a proposal affects the journey. Give current and potential riders different follow-ups.
Survey workflow
Build around one decision and organize responses so patterns can be compared without collecting more personal detail than the project needs.
Name the route, school transportation plan, workplace benefit, or mobility need. Include the service area, relevant modes, time period, and proposal to evaluate.
Review mode choices, location detail, time ranges, rating labels, and conditional paths. Add a prefer-not-to-answer choice for optional personal questions.
Preview as a driver, transit rider, walker, cyclist, carpooler, and person with a mobility need. Check every path and mobile completion.
Publish or embed one link. Export consistent fields, then compare mode, schedule, corridor, and barrier patterns alongside open comments.
Better question design
Question structure determines whether results describe a real trip or only a general attitude. Use comparable choices and leave room for other circumstances.
Field guide
These six field groups form a practical core. Keep questions that serve the decision, remove details you will not analyze, and explain requests for sensitive information.
Trip context
Ask about a defined trip, such as a usual journey to work, a student's trip to school, or a recent route use. Record purpose and frequency so a daily commute differs from an occasional appointment.
Modes and connections
A single-mode answer can hide a walk, transfer, or drive to a park-and-ride. Let respondents select every mode, identify the main one, note transfers, and name a backup when the usual plan fails.
Place and schedule
Route planning needs location context, but often not an exact address. Ask for a neighborhood, ZIP code, cross street, stop, corridor, or distance band at the level your analysis can use.
Time, cost, and reliability
Ask for typical one-way time, waiting or transfer time, out-of-pocket cost, and how often delays cause a late arrival. Use ranges when exact amounts are unnecessary, and distinguish parking availability from price.
Barriers and access
Offer concrete barriers across modes, including unsafe crossings, distance, infrequent service, inaccessible stops, cost, childcare, weather, and no vehicle. Ask about accessibility only as specifically as the decision requires.
Priorities and follow-up
Present realistic choices such as an earlier trip, safer crossing, transit subsidy, shuttle stop, bicycle storage, or carpool match. Ask respondents to rank a limited number without implying that an option will be delivered.
Related tools
Pair the transportation survey with a broader questionnaire or a focused audience-feedback form. Each tool below starts a different collection pattern while keeping the results online and editable.
Create transportation requests, route registrations, rider information forms, or other operational forms beyond survey research.
Open toolStart a general-purpose survey when the project spans transportation and additional community, school, or workplace topics.
Open toolAsk about the broader employee experience alongside commute schedules, flexibility, and workplace programs.
Open toolGather resident comments about streets, public services, neighborhood projects, and local priorities outside a structured travel diary.
Open toolCollect caregiver views about school operations, communication, programs, and student needs in addition to the school journey.
Open toolGive students an age-appropriate channel for reporting their experience, including arrival, departure, and campus access concerns.
Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for planners, school teams, and employers preparing a commuting or mobility needs survey.
A transportation survey is a questionnaire about how, when, where, and why people travel. It can document current modes, trip frequency, time and cost, service use, safety concerns, accessibility needs, and barriers to alternatives. Cities use these findings to understand corridors and mobility needs; schools use them to plan buses, arrival, and safe routes; employers use them to evaluate parking, transit, shuttles, carpooling, and schedule programs. The strongest survey is connected to a defined decision rather than asking for general opinions about transportation.
Include work location, on-site days, shift or arrival window, approximate origin area, primary and backup commute modes, one-way time, transfers, parking use and cost, and the main reasons the current mode is chosen. Then ask about barriers and interest in specific options the employer is considering, such as a transit benefit, shuttle, carpool matching, secure bicycle parking, flexible starts, or an emergency ride home. Avoid requiring names when individual follow-up is not part of the project, and keep demographic or job-role questions optional unless they are essential to analysis.
Collect only the location and identity detail needed for the planning task. For a general needs study, grade band, approximate distance, neighborhood, route, or ZIP code may be enough; an exact address and student name may not be. Ask caregivers about morning and afternoon modes, bus use, accompaniment, schedule constraints, safety barriers, and transportation accommodations in clear terms. Explain why information is requested, mark optional questions accordingly, and consider separating contact details for follow-up from the response dataset used for analysis.
Describe the proposal in plain factual language before asking for feedback. Separate its features: frequency, hours, stops, walking distance, transfers, price, or eligibility should each have their own rating or choice. Avoid wording that calls the proposal an improvement before respondents evaluate it, and offer positive, negative, neutral, unsure, and not-applicable responses where they fit. Ask how the proposal would affect a specific trip and include an open comment. This reveals tradeoffs that a single support-or-oppose question can conceal.
Only when precise routing is necessary and you have a clear plan for handling that detail. Many projects can work with a neighborhood, ZIP code, closest intersection, transit stop, corridor, worksite, school, or distance band. Choose the least specific geography that still supports the analysis. Tell respondents how the answer will be used, provide a prefer-not-to-answer option when appropriate, and do not collect precise locations simply because a form makes the field easy to add.
Give everyone a shared core: trip purpose, frequency, origin and destination level, arrival window, total time, cost range, reliability, and overall difficulty. Then use conditional logic for mode-specific details such as parking for drivers, transfers for transit riders, crossings for walkers, bicycle storage for cyclists, and matching or schedule coordination for carpoolers. Keep answer scales consistent across paths. You can then compare common measures while retaining the operational detail needed to interpret why each group answers differently.
Yes. Makeform supports unlimited free forms and responses, so you can generate, edit, publish, and collect responses to your transportation survey without a response cap. The paid tier removes the Makeform badge. Before sharing widely, preview every conditional path and confirm that your location, accessibility, demographic, and contact questions are necessary and worded for your audience.
Begin with the decision you named before launch. Summarize mode share within the survey sample, trip frequency, time windows, travel-time and cost ranges, common barriers, satisfaction, and improvement priorities. Cross-tab only categories with enough responses to interpret responsibly, such as site, grade band, corridor, shift, current mode, or access need. Read open comments alongside the structured results to understand unusual trips and missing choices. Report who was invited, how the survey was distributed, the response period, and important gaps in representation; do not present a convenience sample as if it automatically represents the entire population.
Turn travel questions into a survey people can answer.
