This article will guide you through how to create a citizen survey about street lighting and why it matters. With Specific, you can quickly build a high-quality survey in seconds—no expertise or manual editing required.
Steps to create a survey for citizens about street lighting
If you want to save time, just click this link to generate a survey with Specific.
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
That’s it. You don’t even need to read further. The AI will create the survey using best practices and deep expert knowledge, ensuring it asks followup questions so you get not just answers, but real insights. If you prefer, you can also compose a survey from scratch using semantic surveys with your own prompt.
Why citizen surveys on street lighting matter
Let’s be honest—street lighting isn’t just about better visibility. These surveys are your way to unlock critical, actionable data that helps shape safer, more welcoming neighborhoods. Consider this: individuals exposed to enhanced LED street lighting reported reduced fear of spending time outdoors at night compared to those under standard lighting conditions. If you’re not running these surveys, you’re missing out on opportunities to improve actual and perceived urban safety, and to demonstrate responsiveness to community concerns. [1]
Better Safety: People feel safer when their feedback translates into visible change.
Urban Well-being: Lighting improvements don’t just lower crime—they also boost citizens’ sense of belonging and confidence in public spaces.
Cost and Efficiency: Feedback can guide investments toward energy-efficient LED upgrades that reduce energy use by up to 69%, saving cities money and cutting emissions. [3]
If you’re not asking for citizen feedback, you’re missing a clear line to understanding both the hard data (crime rates, energy use) and softer outcomes (community trust, satisfaction). These insights help municipalities target where lighting needs work and what citizens actually value—much more effectively than guessing.
Improvements in lighting can directly influence reductions in public space crimes and incivilities[2], but only if you know where to act, and that starts with listening.
What makes a good survey on street lighting
Crafting a survey about street lighting for citizens isn’t just about drafting a few questions. Successful surveys share a few key qualities:
Clear, unbiased questions: Keep questions direct and jargon-free. This avoids confusion and encourages a broader range of citizens to participate.
Conversational tone: Tone should be friendly and informal to make citizens comfortable sharing honest opinions. The AI in Specific nails this automatically.
Followup questions: These uncover deeper insights and resolve ambiguities from initial answers.
Bad Practices | Good Practices |
|---|---|
Leading questions ("Do you agree that new lights are the best?") | Open questions ("How have the new street lights affected your feeling of safety?") |
Overly technical language | Plain, everyday words |
Overly long lists of choices | Clear, concise options (usually 4-5 choices max) |
The best surveys get both a high quantity of responses and high-quality feedback. Combining these two is what turns a “nice-to-have” exercise into actionable strategy that transforms neighborhoods.
Question types and examples for a citizen survey about street lighting
Let’s look at the major question formats you should consider for your citizen survey about street lighting. For a deeper dive and more tips, check out our guide to the best survey questions for citizens on street lighting.
Open-ended questions let people share stories, worries, or suggestions that quantitative questions would miss. They’re best when you want to discover unexpected insights or understand nuanced feedback.
What changes to street lighting would make you feel safer in your neighborhood?
Can you describe a time when poor street lighting affected your experience outdoors at night?
Single-select multiple-choice questions are great for efficiently organizing feedback and tracking trends over time. Use them to quantify the most common opinions or satisfaction levels.
How satisfied are you with the current street lighting in your area?
Very satisfied
Satisfied
Neutral
Dissatisfied
Very dissatisfied
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question is a research gold standard for measuring loyalty or satisfaction. Use it to track public attitude at a glance, then unlock deeper reasons with targeted followups. Want to see how it works? Build your own NPS survey for citizens about street lighting.
On a scale from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely), how likely are you to recommend your area’s street lighting to friends or family?
Followup questions to uncover "the why": Open questions are powerful, but combining them with smart followups is even better. These uncover true motivations or clarify generic answers.
For example:
What would make you rate the street lighting higher?
Can you explain what “unsafe” means to you in this context?
Include followups when initial answers seem too broad or generic, or when you’re aiming to dig into drivers behind satisfaction levels or complaints. If you want more inspiration for crafting the best items, explore more sample questions and tips.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys transform feedback into a natural chat, so citizens feel heard—not interrogated. Instead of a cold form, you’re letting people talk naturally; this gets better, more sincere data. That’s the magic of Specific’s AI survey builder: you simply describe the survey in your own words, and the AI builder structures it, handles followups, and maintains tone—all instantly.
Manual surveys | AI-generated surveys |
|---|---|
Manual question writing and editing | Survey created in seconds by AI, based on a prompt |
No automatic followups; responses can feel flat | Dynamic, expert-level followups for real insights |
Limited ability to adapt tone | Conversational, friendly language every time |
Analysis is a manual chore | AI organizes and summarizes responses for you |
Why use AI for citizen surveys? Because time is precious. A modern AI survey example isn’t just fast—it’s reactive and smart. The AI does the heavy lifting, letting you focus on results, not the process. AI survey generation with Specific means a better experience for both you (as the creator) and your respondents, and it’s fundamentally superior to the old, manual ways. To learn more about designing the survey experience, see our detailed guide on analyzing responses.
Specific offers a best-in-class conversational survey experience, making it easy and delightful to gather feedback with minimal setup and maximum insight.
The power of follow-up questions
Followup questions are what makes conversational surveys stand out. Instead of getting vague answers, you get the rich, layered detail that truly matters. With Specific’s automatic AI followup questions feature, the AI automatically probes for clarification in real time, just like a skilled researcher, digging deeper based on each citizen’s last response. This saves you the pain of manual back-and-forth or email chases and brings out full stories in one session.
Citizen: The lights are okay, I guess.
AI follow-up: What could make the street lighting “better” for you?
Without that followup, you’d just have an unclear comment. With it, you gain clear, actionable feedback in context.
How many followups to ask? Generally, 2–3 targeted followups per question work best. You want to keep the conversation moving while making sure every answer is explained fully. Specific allows you to control this setting, even skipping to the next question when the desired detail is collected.
This makes it a conversational survey: Instead of a static form, the interview feels like a real conversation—resulting in more authentic, useful responses.
AI survey response analysis: Even if you gather a lot of unstructured textual feedback, it’s very easy to analyze using AI. See how to break down and understand every answer in our analysis guide or chat directly with your response data via AI-powered survey analysis tools.
Automated AI followups make for a better, easier survey—try generating a survey yourself and see how much richer your data can be.
See this street lighting survey example now
Experience how fast and insightful it can be to compose a conversational survey—your next citizen survey on street lighting can uncover real stories and drive action, all in minutes.