Intercity Bus Atlas Stops

The Intercity Bus Atlas - Stops dataset uses source data from April 08, 2025 and was created on April 08, 2025 from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) and is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). The Intercity Bus Atlas (ICBA) initiative collects, compiles, maps, publishes, and archives scheduled intercity bus service data provided by North American bus service providers. ICBA data--collected as periodic historic snapshots of available intercity bus services--is intended for federal, state, local, and tribal transportation decision makers, metropolitan planning organizations, transportation-related associations, private sector actors (including the freight community), and the public to better understand the density, frequency, accessibility, and reachability provided by the intercity bus industry's services. The stop, route, and schedule data provided by the ICBA reveal the local, interregional, and international connectivity, service densities, frequencies, and travel patterns enabled by the intercity bus component of the United States' myriad transportation facilities and services as well as how these services co-exist with other modes of passenger travel. The underlying source data of the ICBA are supplied by participating North American bus service providers, who publish their schedule information compliant the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). This GTFS standard allows intercity bus providers to publish operational information on their stops, routes, trips, schedules, fares, and transfers in a way that is maximally interoperable with applications that consume, process, and visualize the data for riders and others interested in learning more about their services. The ICBA, however, relies only on data provided via GTFS' schedule component; while there is a second GTFS component for real-time bus location data, it is not currently utilized or required for the ICBA. More information on GTFS is available at https://gtfs.org/schedule/. In turn, the Bureau of Transportations Statistics collects GTFS schedule data from provider websites and compiles them into a single geospatially enabled database. As of December 2023, this database contains two feature layers, each representing a different component of providers networks: stops and routes. The ICBA Routes dataset shows the alignment of each intercity bus route (i.e., a group of trips displayed to riders as a single service) along the national road network; it combines information from the GTFS "routes.txt", "trips.txt", and "shapes.txt" files. A data dictionary, or other source of attribute information, is accessible at https://doi.org/10.21949/1529306