In 1995, the main means of transportation in Moldova were railways (1,138 km or 707 mi) and a highway system (12,730 km or 7,910 mi overall, including 10,973 km or 6,818 mi of paved surfaces). The major railway junctions are Chișinău, Bender, Ungheni, Ocnița (Oknitsa, in Russian), Bălți, and Basarabeasca (Bessarabka, in Russian). Primary external rail links connect the republic's network with Odesa (in Ukraine) on the Black Sea and with the Romanian cities of Iași and Galați; they also lead northward into Ukraine. Highways link Moldova's main cities and provide the chief means of transportation within the country, but roads are in poor repair. The country's major airport is in Chișinău.

Shipping is possible on the lower Prut and Nistru rivers, but water transportation plays only a modest role in the country's transportation system. In 1990 a total of 317 million tonkilometers of freight were carried on inland waterways as compared with 15,007 million ton-kilometers on railways and 1,673 million ton-kilometers on roads.

The movement of manufactured goods and of passengers on all means of transportation started to decline in 1989. From 1993 to 1994, for example, the total amount of transported goods fell by 31 percent, passenger traffic decreased by 28 percent, and the number of passengers declined by 24 percent. The main causes for these declines are the high cost of transportation, a lack of fuels, and the poor state of Moldova's transportation infrastructure: approximately 20 percent of Moldova's roads are considered in a critical technical state.