Calgary reached several significant milestones in 2009: the city’s population exceeded one million people, Calgary Transit celebrated 100 years of operation, and a new long range plan was approved guiding land use and transportation for the next 60 years. The new Calgary Transportation Plan includes a vision of a Primary Transit Network with the highest standards of level of service, operating speed, connectivity and amenities to attract new customers. The Primary Transit Network will support the intensification of population and employment along designated nodes and corridors within the existing developed area of the city. This vision builds on Calgary’s past success in operating an efficient, effective transit system in a relatively young western city. Calgary is known for its highly successful light rail transit (LRT) network and extensive bus network. Approximately 70 per cent of LRT passengers in Calgary access the stations via bus. This paper reflects on past bus priority measures in Calgary, such as bus-only crossings, to highlight the effectiveness of transit priority in encouraging travellers to shift to public transit. It details the implementation of more recent traffic control measures providing bus priority through bottlenecks in Calgary, including queue jumps, high-occupancy vehicle lanes, bypass lanes, and transit signal priority. The dedication of $10 million to transit priority measures under the Build Canada Fund highlights the importance of bus priority in traffic operations. Bus priority is integral to Calgary Transit’s future plans, including LRT feeder bus networks, on-street bus-rapid transit (BRT), and bus-only facilities.
