In this article, we survey the main achievements of moving objects with transportation modes that span the past decade. As an important kind of human behavior, transportation modes reflect characteristic movement features and enrich the mobility with informative knowledge. We make explicit comparisons with closely related work that investigates moving objects by incorporating into location-dependent semantics and descriptive attributes. An exhaustive survey is offered by considering the following aspects: 1) modeling and representing mobility data with motion modes; 2) answering spatio-temporal queries with transportation modes; 3) query optimization techniques; 4) predicting transportation modes from sensor data, e.g., GPS-enabled devices. Several new and emergent issues concerning transportation modes are proposed for future research.