The Intercity Bus Atlas (ICBA) is a program to build, publish, and regularly update an interactive, digital mapping application of all scheduled, inter-city passenger bus services, as represented by their networks of stops and routes, in the United States. 

All data represented on the ICBA is sourced from North American scheduled bus service providers, who transmit their schedule and network data using the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), a data format developed for urban public transit operators to easily share key information about their networks (e.g., stops, routes, trips, schedules, calendars, fares, and transfers) to the public.

The Providers represented on the Atlas have all either (1) allow BTS to use their GTFS data after agreeing to the terms of the ICBA data-use agreement or (2) already submit their GTFS feeds to the National Transit Map because they receive Federal Transit Administration funding to operate one or more of their intercity routes and therefore are required to submit their data as part of their regular submissions to the National Transit Database.

On a quarterly basis, BTS compiles all these feeds into a single, geospatially-enabled, national-level database and publishes it to its website. Since the introduction of the Intercity Bus Atlas project in 2017, the Atlas and its accompanying data, maps, and geographic information systems (GIS) layers now feature data from over 90 providers.

All this work helps BTS accomplish its key goals for the Intercity Bus Atlas program:

• Collect geospatial and statistical information about intercity bus travel akin to those from other modes of inter-city scheduled passenger travel
• Provide policy-makers and elected officials with data, statistics, maps, and tools needed to make evidence-based decisions
• Facilitate public- and private-sector research on intercity bus services
• Identify and inventory intercity bus facilities, especially when they facilitate inter-modal connections
• Produce information on the density, frequency, and reachability of the intercity bus network against relevant population characteristics

Current and future ICBA work will be focused on expanding participation and building reliable and sustainable data collection methods, with longer-term goals to add functionality to its web maps and tools and to archive and share its growing cache of historic data.