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Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Implementation of the National Intercity Bus Atlas. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/29119.
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SUMMARY

Implementation of the National Intercity Bus Atlas

Conducted under the Transportation Research Board (TRB) National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), this project, NCHRP 08-133(01), “Implementing the National Intercity Bus Atlas,” built on its predecessor project, NCHRP 08-133, and endeavored to continue the development and implementation of the Intercity Bus Atlas (ICBA) as a national resource. Together these projects provided resources toward expanding the number of intercity bus carriers represented in the ICBA to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the intercity bus network. These projects also developed and deployed an updated framework for long-term maintenance of the ICBA, to include standardizing the use of General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) feeds as the ICBA data source and capturing and refreshing GTFS format feeds from intercity bus carriers that agreed to participate in the ICBA project.

This project produced a set of three guides to support greater usage of the ICBA and ideally help drive additional intercity bus carriers to participate in the future. These guides are as follows:

  1. User Guide for Intercity Bus Carriers, Ticketing Services, Schedulers, and Business Development Planners
  2. User Guide for State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Entities
  3. Intercity Bus Atlas Maintenance and Improvements Guide

The first two user guides educate and inform actual and potential users of and participants in the ICBA project around the data included in the ICBA, including key aspects of GTFS. The user guide for industry discusses the benefits for inclusion and covers the data requirements for participating in the ICBA, including more technical discussion of the components of GTFS needed and how to develop them. The User Guide for State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Entities provides background information on GTFS and discusses several use cases for the ICBA, the GTFS data that underlies the ICBA, and the analyses made possible with these or together with other available data.

The third guide is focused on growing and sustaining the ICBA project into the future, identifying methods and requirements for its maintenance and advancement. This guide discusses the resourcing and processes to power the ICBA project and suggests and illuminates four key topics for a proposed standards of practice for an ongoing ICBA program.

While the full ambition of the NCHRP ICBA effort was to produce a robust map of intercity bus services by garnering a wider spread of participation by intercity bus carriers—and this report documents the effort to try to build that participation—more responses from the organizations and individuals contacted would have been helpful, which highlights the need for enhanced outreach strategies with stakeholders in any future phase of the ICBA project.

Page 1
Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Implementation of the National Intercity Bus Atlas. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/29119.
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In 2019, the American Intercity Bus Riders Association created the National Intercity Bus Atlas, a database of intercity bus transit services in the United States. The Intercity Bus Atlas was developed to facilitate the promotion of intercity bus use by providing comprehensive service provider, route, and scheduling information in a public-facing online platform. Before this, there had been no publicly available national clearinghouse, list, or map of intercity bus services.

NCHRP Research Report 1150: Implementation of the National Intercity Bus Atlas, from TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program, documents that the development of the data framework for mapping. Technical challenges and hesitancy by some private carriers to share certain operating data resulted in several key information gaps. The report offers suggested future improvements to the atlas such as including more service characteristics and strategies to address data collection challenges.

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