Calgary traffic volumes: daily counts by road segment

You want to know how busy a Calgary road is: the daily traffic on a commute, a comparison between two routes or the volume on the street outside a school. The City of Calgary publishes a Traffic Volumes dataset for each survey year. This guide uses Traffic Volumes for 2023; the same steps apply to the other years.

Explore the traffic flow map

1. Open the 2023 traffic volumes map in CanQuery. Each line is a road segment surveyed by the City.
2. Zoom to the road you care about and select a segment. The record shows SECTION_NAME (the road and the stretch between two cross streets), VOLUME, YEAR and COLLECTION.
3. Switch to the table view to search a road by name. Type Deerfoot or 16 Avenue in the search box to list every surveyed segment with that name, then sort by VOLUME to find the busiest stretch.
4. Chart or export the filtered rows. The CSV export is limited to 10,000 rows, which covers a full year's segments.

The table is prepared the first time someone opens it; later visits use the prepared copy.

Read a volume correctly

The City describes VOLUME as the Average Daily Weekday Traffic (ADWT): the average number of vehicles in 24 hours, adjusted for seasonal variation, representing an average weekday, and counted in both directions combined. Volumes on provincial roads are supplied by Alberta Transportation as a weighted annual average daily traffic figure, so compare them with city-counted segments carefully.

A segment's volume reflects the conditions of its survey year, including construction, detours and operating conditions in place at the time. The City publishes the map as a general representation of traffic across the city, not as a guarantee for a specific day. Keep YEAR and COLLECTION with any number you quote.

Compare years

CanQuery lists a traffic volumes dataset for each year the City has published, including 2024, 2022 and 2019. Segments are not guaranteed to match from one year to the next, so compare the SECTION_NAME text and the map geometry before treating two numbers as the same stretch of road.

Check the official source

The City of Calgary's dataset page carries the City's description, licence and attachments. Questions about how a count was taken belong with the City; CanQuery provides the map, the table and the link back to the source.

The Calgary place page lists the City's other open data. When you share a finding, include the CanQuery dataset page, the survey year and the date you consulted it.

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – City of Calgary.