Deerfoot Trail is a freeway segment of Highway 2 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It stretches the entire length of the city from south to north and links suburbs to downtown via Memorial Drive and 17 Avenue SE. The freeway begins south of Calgary where it splits from Macleod Trail, crosses the Bow River into city limits, and reaches the Stoney Trail ring road. Crisscrossing twice more with the river, it intersects Glenmore Trail and Memorial Drive; the former is a major east–west expressway while the latter is a freeway spur into downtown. In north Calgary, it crosses Highway 1 and passes Calgary International Airport before ending at a second interchange with Stoney Trail. Highway 2 becomes the Queen Elizabeth II Highway as it continues north into Rocky View County towards Edmonton.
Originally called Blackfoot Trail Freeway upon the opening of the first section in 1971, it was renamed in 1974 to honour Deerfoot, a late-19th-century Siksika Nation (Blackfoot) long-distance runner known for his exceptional speed. Subsequent sections opened in 1975, 1980, 1982 and 2003. Deerfoot was not entirely a freeway until 2005 when the final of four at-grade intersections in southeast Calgary was converted to an interchange. Well known for its frequent rush hour congestion and collisions, traffic levels have steadily increased as Calgary's population has tripled to over 1.2 million since 1971. The mostly six-lane freeway is Alberta's busiest road with volume exceeding 173,000 vehicles per day between Highway 1 and Memorial Drive in 2019, more than twice that for which it was designed. The province of Alberta has been fiscally responsible for the road since 2000 but now seeks to offload maintenance and future improvement costs to the city of Calgary. The two parties remain at odds over who should operate the road in the long-term but completed a joint study in 2021 that offered long and short-term recommendations for improvement. A $478 million commitment to the freeway by Alberta was later reduced to $210 million. A public–private partnership project to improve the road includes widening, bridge twinning and interchange improvements; work is tentatively scheduled to begin in late 2022 to be completed by 2026.
Route description
Overview
As a segment of Highway 2, Deerfoot Trail is a core route of the National Highway System and a key international corridor. It is also part of Calgary's Primary Goods Movement Network and is identified as a skeletal road in the city's Transportation Plan, a limited-access route important for long distance travellers, and is the only route that stretches the entire length of the city from north to south. From its split with Highway 2A (Macleod Trail) near the hamlet of De Winton in the south, it runs north to Stoney Trail at Calgary's northern city limit where it becomes the Queen Elizabeth II Highway. The freeway roughly bisects the city, though it lies entirely east of Centre Street which officially marks the boundary between the east and west side of the city. From its southern terminus until Memorial Drive, Deerfoot approximates the course of the Bow River. Initially the freeway is on the east side, then crosses to the west bank, and finally back to the east before the river and Memorial Drive veer west at Inglewood towards downtown. Most of the road's northern half parallels Nose Creek, a tributary of the Bow.
Deerfoot is a divided freeway for its entire 46.4-kilometre length, ranging from four to eight lanes wide. The northbound and southbound lanes are separated by an approximately wide depressed grass median near De Winton, which narrows and becomes a combination of Jersey and constant-slope barriers through most of south Calgary before returning to grass of varying widths from 17 Avenue SE to the north terminus. In north Calgary the grass median is supplemented by of high-tension cable barriers (HTCB) that were added in 2007, virtually eliminating the risk of serious median collisions. It was the first major HTCB installation in Canada. The freeway has a posted speed limit of from its origin at Highway 2A until just after the first Bow River crossing, after which the limit is reduced to for the next through most of Calgary until Beddington Trail in the northeast where the limit returns to 110 km/h. The entire route is paved with asphalt, except for a concrete section in south Calgary.