Running a Microtransit Feasibility Survey
Microtransit pilots fail in public and expensively. The usual cause isn't the technology or the vendor — it's a zone drawn around a jurisdiction instead of around a travel market. Find out where people actually need to go before you sign anything.
The failure mode this study prevents
A microtransit pilot gets scoped as "on-demand service within the city limits, weekdays 7am to 6pm." Six months in, ridership is a third of projection. The post-mortem finds that the two biggest trip generators — a hospital campus and a distribution employer — sit just outside the boundary, and that the largest unserved demand was second-shift workers finishing at 11pm.
Both of those findings were available before procurement, from residents, for the cost of a survey. Neither is discoverable from a stated-preference question that asks whether people would like on-demand service in the abstract.
Ask about a real trip, with a real price on it.
Stated preference overstates demand. The correction is to anchor every question to something concrete rather than something hypothetical.
- Draw the trip you took yesterday — a Route Creator question, anchored to an actual trip rather than an imagined one.
- How did you make it? Mode today is what tells you whether microtransit would be new ridership or a mode shift off your own fixed route.
- Would you have paid $X and waited Y minutes for it? The fare and wait belong in the question, not in a footnote.
- What time did it start? Service hours are decided here, and they are the thing most often scoped wrong.
- How often is that trip? Daily commutes and monthly errands justify very different fleets.
Let the data draw the zone
Constrain the map to a generously sized study area with a Map Boundary — larger than the zone you have in mind — and let respondents draw wherever they actually go. Export the geometry and look at the density. The zone boundary should be an output of this study, not an input to it.
There are no riders to intercept yet.
This is what makes feasibility work harder than evaluating an existing service. You're sampling a population defined by a service that doesn't exist. These channels are the ones that reliably produce usable sample.
Existing fixed-route riders
QR codes on the lines serving and bordering the proposed zone. These are the people most likely to shift, and the easiest to reach.
Major employers
Email lists through HR at hospitals, campuses, and distribution centers inside the zone. Shift times come out of this channel.
Community organizations
Senior centers, community health, and social-service partners reach transit-dependent residents who won't see a municipal link.
Kiosks at anchors
A tablet running kiosk mode at a library, clinic, or community center collects walk-up responses into the same dataset.
What the study produces
Three artifacts, and they map directly onto three procurement decisions. The drawn trip geometry (GeoJSON, straight into your GIS) defines the zone. The trip start-time distribution defines the service hours. The frequency and mode-today cross-tabs give you the demand estimate and tell you how much of it is genuinely new ridership rather than cannibalized fixed route — which is the number a skeptical board member will ask for.
Keep the survey. When the pilot launches, copy it and change the tense: the before/after against an identical instrument is what decides whether the pilot becomes permanent service.
Common questions
- What is the single most important question in a microtransit feasibility survey?
- Where would you go, and when? Everything else in the study — fleet size, zone boundary, service hours, vendor scope — is downstream of the trip table. A Route Creator question that has residents draw the trips they would actually take produces that table directly, in a form the modeling desk can use.
- How do we avoid the "yes, that sounds nice" problem?
- Stated-preference surveys reliably overstate demand when the question is abstract. The two levers that pull the number back toward reality are specificity and cost. Ask about a concrete trip they take now rather than a hypothetical one, and put a fare and a wait time in the question. "Would you use on-demand transit?" and "would you have used a $3 ride with a 15-minute wait for the trip you took yesterday?" produce very different — and very differently useful — answers.
- How do we define the zone boundary?
- Let the drawn trips define it rather than deciding first. Field the survey over a generously sized study area constrained by a Map Boundary, export the drawn geometry as GeoJSON, and look at where the density actually falls. Zones drawn from municipal boundaries almost always cut through the middle of a real travel market.
- Who should we survey if the service does not exist yet?
- This is the hard part, because there are no riders to intercept. The channels that work: existing fixed-route riders in and near the proposed zone (QR codes on those vehicles), employer and major-institution email lists inside the zone, senior centers and community organizations serving groups likely to be transit-dependent, and a general public link pushed through municipal channels. Expect to work harder on reach than you would for an existing-service study, and report the geographic coverage you achieved honestly.
- What about paratransit and ADA riders?
- Worth surveying explicitly and separately. Microtransit proposals frequently get justified partly on paratransit cost avoidance, and that argument needs its own evidence — whether existing paratransit trips could actually be served by the proposed zone and hours. TIPS includes an ADA paratransit template as a starting point.
- Can we reuse this survey for the pilot evaluation later?
- Yes, and you should plan for it. Copy the survey once the pilot is running and change the tense of the questions — the before/after comparison against an instrument that started identical is far more persuasive than two unrelated studies, and it is the evidence that decides whether the pilot becomes permanent.
Start from the microtransit-demand template
TIPS ships a microtransit-demand template — Route Creator trip capture, fare and wait sensitivity, timing, and frequency already wired up. Customize the zone and it's fieldable the same day.
Start free 14-day trial About templates