The Intercity Bus Atlas (ICBA) is a program to build, publish, and regularly updated 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), the 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 whose services are 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 participate in 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 feed as part of their regular submissions to the National Transit Database.

On a quarterly basis, BTS compiles these feeds--regardless of how each of them were received--into a single, geospatially-enabled, national-level database, which it subsequently publishes to its website. Over the course of the regular updates BTS has performed to the Intercity Bus Atlas since its introduction in BTS, the Atlas, with its accompanying data, maps, and geographic information systems (GIS) layers, now feature data from over 90 providers.

All this work is ultimately intended to help BTS accomplish its key goals for the Intercity Bus Atlas program:

• Compile geospatial and statistical information about the intercity bus industry alongside 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 is now 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 feed out its growing cache of historic data.