BTS Updates Datasets to National Transportation Atlas Database

Friday, July 28, 2023

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BTS Updates Datasets to National Transportation Atlas Database

Friday, July 28, 2023

The U.S. Department of Transportation's (USDOT) Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) today released its summer 2023 update to the National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD), a set of nationwide geographic databases of transportation facilities, networks, and associated infrastructure.

Three (3) new layers have been added to the NTAD with this release, the USDOT Region layers for the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Federal Aviation Administration.

The updated layers in this release include:

National Parks;
Nonattainment Areas;
Alternative Fueling Stations – updated daily;
118th Congressional Districts – attributes updated weekly;
Dams;
Aviation Facilities – updated monthly;
Inland Electronic Navigational Charts;
National Bridge Inventory and Element data for 2023;
National Tunnel Inventory and Element data for 2023;
Bikeshare Scooter Systems;
National Transit Map Stops;
National Transit Map Routes;
National Transit Map Agencies;
North American Rail Network Lines;
North American Rail Network Nodes;
Railroad Grade Crossings;
2022 Travel Monitoring Analysis System - Station and Volume Data;
Alternative Fueling Corridors;
Metropolitan Planning Organization boundaries;
Urban areas;
Places (with 2020 Census population data);
Intercity Bus Atlas Routes;
Intercity Bus Atlas Stops;

This release introduces new subset layers of the North American Rail Network Lines dataset for each of the six class I freight railroads, which include: BNSF Railway, Canadian National (CN) Railway, Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC), CSX Transportation, Norfolk Southern (NS) Railway, and Union Pacific (UP) Railroad. ¹

Class I railroads have operating revenues of $490 million or more as of March 2020.² In 2018 U.S. railroads carried a total of 1.73 trillion ton-miles of freight, which was 33% of ton-miles across all modes of transportation.³ These subset layers can be used for analysis and cartographic display. The map below shows each of the class I railroads at a national scale. It is important to note that class I railroads share ownership and trackage rights.

Summer NTAD

About the National Transportation Atlas Database NTAD data is available for download in comma separated values (CSV), Keyhole Markup Language (KML), and shapefile formats through the BTS Geospatial Data Catalog. Additionally, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard Web Feature Services (WFS) and Web Mapping Services (WMS) are available for all NTAD datasets, here and here. Also available are optimized services for fast rendering of full NTAD datasets and vector tile services for 13 of the largest NTAD datasets. These faster services are designated in NTAD by service names ending in "DS" for each layer and "VT" for the vector tiles services.

BTS now uses a dynamic NTAD publication cycle, with updated data released throughout the year as they become available from their respective government agencies. Follow BTS on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram or subscribe to email updates for announcements of additional dataset releases throughout the year.

Contacts

Media: BTSNews@dot.gov.

Technical: Dominic Menegus: (202) 366-8717 or ntad@dot.gov.

¹Canadian Pacific (CP) and Kansas City Southern (KCS) have recently merged per a business prospective, but is not reflected in the North American Rail Network until the dispatching is unified

²United States Department of Transportation, Federal Railroad Admiration. Freight Rail Overview. Washington, DC: 2020-07-08. https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-rail-overview

³United States Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). (2022, updated yearly). Table 1-50: U.S. Ton-Miles of Freight (BTS special tabulation) (millions). [dataset]. bts.dot.gov files. Accessed 2023-07-20 from https://www.bts.dot.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/2022-04/table_01_50_042522.xlsx