Installing bike parking should not be the end of the journey for any premises managers and owners. We always advise our clients that this should really be the beginning. Once your bike storage is installed and in use, you should start thinking about the mundane yet equally important aspects, such as maintenance, monitoring, and improvements, if necessary.
In our previous blog, we explored why monitoring and auditing are important and how to do it properly. There, we mentioned surveys, and here we expand on the topic with a short guide on how to create good surveys that give you meaningful, actionable information.
Start with what you want to find out
Before writing any questions, decide what you need the survey to tell you and make a list of your goals.
Are you looking to see if people are happy with the facility? Are you planning improvements and you want more information on what issues to target? Or are you puzzled by underoccupancy and still seeing bikes parked in random spots away from the actual bike parking?
It could be all three. The information you need will determine the questions you ask.
Survey the right people
Who you ask matters as much as what you ask. Consider who you need to hear from when designing your sample, including under-represented groups and people with disabilities.
Make a list of the different groups that could provide useful information. These might include regular users, occasional cyclists, people who cycle but park elsewhere, and people who have stopped cycling to the site.
If you are wondering about improvements, you should be asking current users. If you are having issues with underuse, you may need to get more creative and circulate your survey throughout the building to reach the right group of people.
For a workplace, for example, you could promote the survey through staff communications and make it available directly at the cycle parking area. For a public building, a QR code displayed near the facility could provide a simple way for users to respond immediately after parking.
The aim is to collect useful responses from people whose experience can inform decisions.
Ask specific questions
When constructing questions, be specific. Consider the difference between these two questions:
“Are you happy with our cycle parking?”
“How satisfied are you with the security of the cycle parking?”
The first question has a simple yes-or-no answer, which tells you little. The second question is a lot more specific. It provides information about a specific part of the facility. If satisfaction is low, you have a clearer indication of where further investigation may be needed.
Being specific should also keep you on target to avoid questions that combine separate issues. Asking someone how satisfied they are with security and capacity, for example, makes it difficult to understand which part of the experience has influenced their answer. Keep subjects separate.
For more ideas on questions, follow the download link at the end of the blog to get a full survey template.
Avoid leading questions
A survey should not encourage people towards a particular answer.
For example: “Do you think we should improve our cycle parking?” is unlikely to provide particularly useful information. Most respondents can reasonably be expected to support improvements because who doesn’t?
A better approach is to ask about the current experience:
“How satisfied are you with the current cycle parking?”
You can then follow this with a more specific question:
“What is the main improvement you would like to see?”
This gives respondents the opportunity to identify an actual issue rather than simply agreeing that improvements would be beneficial.
Include a small number of open questions
Closed questions make results easier to measure, but they do not always explain the reason behind a response. To broaden the scope without asking a leading question, include an opportunity for respondents to provide their own comments. One well-worded open question can reveal issues that you had not considered when creating the survey.
For example:
“What is the one thing you would most like us to improve about the cycle parking?”
This could uncover requests for additional capacity, better lighting, more weather protection, larger spaces for cargo bikes, improved access or a different type of cycle stand.
Avoid filling the survey with open-ended questions though. They take longer to complete and can be more difficult to analyse. Use them where a written response is likely to provide information that a fixed answer cannot.
Beware of the length
Generally speaking, the longer a survey takes to complete, the fewer people complete it.
As we wrote above, open-ended questions should be few because they take too much time; this logic applies to your survey as a whole. When constructing it, you need to ensure it does not take an inordinate amount of time to finish. Even the most well-meaning cyclist who wants to be helpful will not be happy to answer questions for half an hour.
When you think you are ready with your survey, it is a good idea always to test it on a real person. See how long it takes them to complete and adjust accordingly.
Online surveys tend to be short as people are easily distracted and there is no cost to disengaging. Keeping the survey concise can help reduce the risk of break-off, although the appropriate length will depend on the target audience and their motivation to participate.
In-person interviews and street intercepts can be long or short. It all depends on the setting and timing. Morning rush hour, when people may be running late, is unlikely to be a good time for a 10-minute survey; a lunch break or someone waiting for the bus, however, might be a suitable time.
For unplanned street intercepts, a short survey of around five minutes is a sensible and safe option, especially when respondents have not agreed in advance to take part.
The main principle is simple: keep the survey no longer than necessary, and test the actual respondent experience rather than relying only on how long you think it will take.
Choose the right time to ask
Timing can influence responses, so keep that in mind. It can both influence how willing they are to talk and what they say. Someone completing a survey immediately after struggling to find a space may have a different view from someone using an empty facility at a quiet time.
Additionally, remember to try and collect responses across representative periods rather than relying on a single day. This is particularly important where usage changes between weekdays and weekends or during different seasons, especially holidays.
For ongoing monitoring, use a consistent approach each time the survey is conducted. This makes it easier to identify genuine changes in satisfaction rather than changes caused by when or how the survey was distributed.
Repeat the survey
In general, keep in mind that surveys are rarely a one off event, or at least they shouldn’t be. One survey provides a snapshot. Repeated surveys provide a way to monitor change.
The best practice is to use surveys before and after a change – this is the most reasonable way to gauge whether there has been any change in behaviour post-intervention. If you have done a survey revealing a poor security score and have made improvements to your bike parking by adding CCTV, repeat the same core questions afterwards. You can then compare satisfaction with security before and after the intervention.
Even when no major changes have been made, an annual survey can help identify emerging issues and track changes in user satisfaction. Keep the core questions consistent, while leaving some space for new questions where circumstances have changed. Over time, this creates a useful record of how the facility is performing and what users need from it.
Better bike parking
A meaningful bike parking survey does not need to be long or complicated. It needs to ask the right people clear questions about specific aspects of their experience.
Start with the decisions you need to make, design questions that provide evidence for those decisions, and use the same approach when you repeat the survey.
Combined with occupancy monitoring and regular physical audits, user feedback can give facilities managers a much clearer understanding of whether their bike parking is doing its job and where to focus investment or improvements. Once the responses are collected and analysed, make sure you act on them to make your bike parking area a better facility that people love using.