Running an Employer Commute Survey
Shuttles, vanpools, and transit-benefit programs fail for a consistent reason: they get designed around an assumed commute. Ask the workforce where they actually come from and when they actually start, before anybody buys a seat.
Why the 9-to-5 assumption breaks these programs
A commute program gets designed from a rough sense of where staff live and an assumption that the working day runs roughly nine to five. Then it launches, and the shuttle runs three-quarters empty because a third of the workforce is on shifts that start at 6am, 2pm, and 10pm, and the pickup corridor was drawn through a neighborhood where relatively few of them live.
Both facts were knowable in advance from a five-minute survey. Neither shows up in a payroll zip-code summary, because that tells you where people live without telling you when they travel or whether the transit connection is remotely plausible for them.
Six questions, and the trade-off has to be in them.
Draw your commute
A Route Creator question, or zip code from the profile step. Either gives you clustering for a pickup corridor without asking for a home address.
Exact shift times
Clock times, not "typical hours." The shift distribution is what determines whether a program serves a third of the workforce or all of it.
How you got here this week
Mode today, anchored to an actual week. This is the baseline every mode-shift claim in the eventual program report gets measured against.
The concrete alternative
Name the departure time, the walk, and the cost. A warm answer to a vague question is the most expensive data you can collect.
What blocks you
Mid-day errands, childcare pickup, tools to carry, unpredictable overtime. These are the constraints that a shuttle either accommodates or founders on.
Rank the options
A Route Ranker across shuttle, vanpool, transit subsidy, and parking cash-out. Ranking forces a choice; rating them all just marks them all good.
Internal mail beats agency mail, and break rooms beat both.
Response rate on an employer survey is almost entirely a function of who sends it. An email from HR or the facilities manager gets opened; the same survey sent from an outside agency address gets ignored — and the employees least likely to open any work email are frequently the ones with the fewest transportation options.
- HR or facilities email — import the list, or have them forward the link
- Break rooms and time clocks — posted QR codes for shift workers who don't sit at a desk
- The existing shuttle stop — if there's a program already, that's where its users are
- Onboarding and benefits enrollment — a standing link catches new hires continuously
- A tablet kiosk at the benefits fair — walk-up responses into the same dataset
Say what happens to the answers
Employees are being asked where they live and when they arrive, by their employer. State plainly in the invitation who sees the results and at what level of aggregation. Where individual-level detail isn't needed, don't collect an email at all — anonymous responses still cluster geographically and still produce a shuttle route.
What it produces
An origin density map that shows whether a viable pickup corridor exists at all; a shift-time distribution that sets the service span; and a cross-tab of mode-shift willingness against origin and shift, which tells you which segment of the workforce a pilot should target first. For a TMA or agency running this across several employers, deep-copy the survey per site — identical instrument, separate datasets, directly comparable results.
Keep the baseline. When the program launches, the mode-share question you asked beforehand is what makes any later claim about mode shift credible.
Common questions
- Who runs these — the employer or the agency?
- Both, and often together. Transit agencies and TMAs field them to size employer-focused service; large employers field them to design shuttles and benefit programs; consultants field them as part of a TDM plan or a development's traffic mitigation requirement. The instrument is substantially the same in all three cases — what changes is who owns the mailing list.
- How do we get employees to respond?
- Distribution through the employer rather than around it. An email from HR or a facilities manager outperforms an agency-branded invitation by a wide margin, because employees read internal mail. Posted QR codes in break rooms, near time clocks, and at the shuttle stop pick up the shift workers who do not sit at a desk and may never open a work email.
- What is the most commonly missed question?
- Shift start and end times, asked precisely rather than as "when do you work?" Programs designed around a 9-to-5 assumption fail for the second and third shifts, and second-shift workers are frequently the population with the least transportation access and the most to gain. Ask for actual clock times and report the distribution.
- How do we test whether people would really switch modes?
- Put the trade-off in the question. "Would you use a shuttle?" gets a warm answer that predicts nothing. "Would you use a shuttle that left the transit center at 6:40am and got you here at 7:05, if it cost nothing?" gets an answer you can plan against, because it names the cost in time. Ask about the trip they made this week, not a typical week.
- Do we need home addresses?
- No, and asking for them from employees raises understandable objections. A Route Creator question capturing the drawn commute, or the zip code from the pre-survey profile step, gives you what a shuttle route or vanpool grouping actually needs. Zip-level origin clustering is enough to identify whether there is a viable pickup corridor.
- Can the same survey be used across several employers?
- Yes — deep-copy it per employer so each has its own dataset and its own reporting, while the instrument stays identical. That lets you compare mode-shift willingness across sites, which is usually how a TMA or agency decides where to put a pilot first.
Start from the commuter mode-choice template
TIPS includes a commuter mode-choice template with the origin, timing, and mode-shift questions already built. Customize it to the worksite and send it to HR the same day.
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