Stoney Trail | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Highway 201 | ||||
 Highway 201 encircles all of Calgary, Alberta. | ||||
| Route information | ||||
| Maintained by Alberta Transportation | ||||
| Length | 101 km[1] (63 mi) | |||
| History | 2009 (NW/NE legs open) 2013 (SE leg open) 2020 (SW leg north open)[b] 2021 (SW leg south open) 2023 (W leg open) | |||
| Major junctions | ||||
| Ring road around Calgary | ||||
| Location | ||||
| Country | Canada | |||
| Province | Alberta | |||
| Major cities | Calgary | |||
| Highway system | ||||
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Alberta Provincial Highway No. 201, officially named Stoney Trail and Tsuut'ina Trail,[a] is a 101-kilometre (63 mi) freeway that encircles the city of Calgary, Alberta. It serves as a bypass for the congested routes of 16 Avenue N and Deerfoot Trail through Calgary (Highways 1 and 2, respectively). At its busiest point near Beddington Trail in north Calgary, the six-lane freeway carried nearly 60,000 vehicles per day in 2022,[2] and forms part of the CANAMEX Corridor which connects Calgary to Edmonton and Interstate 15 in the United States via Highways 2, 3, and 4.
The official starting point of the ring is at Deerfoot Trail in southeast Calgary, with exit numbers increasing as the freeway proceeds clockwise. West of Deerfoot, it crosses the Bow River and Macleod Trail before turning north and becoming Tsuut'ina Trail as it crosses Fish Creek into the Tsuutʼina Nation. North of the Elbow River, the name reverts to Stoney Trail as the highway bends west to a split from Highway 8. It turns north across Highway 1 and a second crossing of the Bow River near Canada Olympic Park to Crowchild Trail, winding through the hills of northwest Calgary to Deerfoot Trail and the southern end of the Queen Elizabeth II Highway. Turning south, the ring again intersects Highway 1, crosses Glenmore Trail, and curves west at the neighbourhood of Mahogany back to Deerfoot Trail, completing the ring.
The freeway's "Stoney" name is derived from the Nakoda First Nation, one of several major thoroughfares in the region that bear Indigenous names. Construction first began in northwest Calgary as an expressway in the 1990s, incrementally extending clockwise towards Deerfoot Trail before two public–private partnership (P3) projects completed the northeast and southeast sections in 2009 and 2013, respectively. After decades of struggling to acquire right of way from the adjacent Tsuutʼina Nation for the southwest portion of the road, Alberta finally struck a CA$275 million deal in 2013 with the Nation that included a transfer of Crown land and other compensation, allowing completion of the southwest quadrant in 2021. A final short segment between Highways 1 and 8 opened in 2023, some 70 years after Calgary city planners had first presented plans for the ring road.
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- ^ "Christmas comes early for Calgary drivers". Government of Alberta. December 18, 2023. Retrieved August 14, 2024.
- ^ "ALBERTA HIGHWAYS 1 TO 986 / TRAFFIC VOLUME, VEHICLE CLASSIFICATION, TRAVEL and ESAL STATISTICS REPORT / 2019" (PDF). Alberta Transportation. March 10, 2020. pp. 36–37. Retrieved June 10, 2020.