It stretches the entire length of the city from south to north and links suburbs to downtown via Memorial Drive and 17 Avenue SE.

[17] Rising from the river, the freeway enters Calgary limits and its southern suburban neighbourhoods of Cranston and Seton to which access is provided by a partial cloverleaf interchange.

[19] Immediately after the river, Deerfoot merges with the major routes of Anderson Road and Bow Bottom Trail, often a point of congestion at rush hour.

[20] The freeway curves north along the river's west bank to cross Southland Drive, paralleling Blackfoot Trail near the community of Acadia.

[7] North of Acadia, the freeway bisects a large area of commercial development for several kilometres before reaching a major interchange at Glenmore Trail.

[22] Deerfoot turns sharply to the east and again crosses the Bow River on the Calf Robe Bridge, named after a Siksika Nation elder.

[14] Veering back to the north, it follows the river's east bank across Peigan Trail to a partial cloverleaf interchange at 17 Avenue SE, passing the neighbourhoods of Dover and Southview.

[23] The six lane freeway enters light commercial development north of 32 Avenue NE and passes McKnight Boulevard, providing access to airport-related light industrial areas as well as Nose Hill Park, which is visible to the west.. Access to Huntington Hills and Deerfoot Mall are then provided by an interchange at 64 Avenue NE.

In conjunction with the northeast portion which opened in 2009, it formed a full eastern bypass of Calgary providing an alternate route for traffic transiting the city.

[14] A 1996 crash on the bridge claimed the life of a teenager when her northbound car struck the rear of a fire truck parked in the left shoulder attending to an accident in the southbound lanes.

[5] The most recent interchanges to be constructed at the north and south ends of the freeway are more consistently of the partial cloverleaf type, a design highly used in Alberta as it is a desirable compromise between cost and capacity.

[51] Due to its quickly rising population in the 1960s, Calgary initiated planning for the construction of an extensive freeway and expressway network that included numerous north–south and east–west routes.

[58] In December 1974, Premier Peter Lougheed reiterated his opposition to the planned routing for the southern portion of Deerfoot Trail, which would take the freeway along the west side of the Bow River through Fish Creek Park.

[50][59] Lougheed acknowledged that diverting the freeway to the east would be significantly more expensive, but was firm on protecting and preserving Fish Creek as an urban park.

[56] The new pavement continued south alongside Nose Creek and was originally to carry on straight across the river into Inglewood, but residents of the neighbourhood fought adamantly against construction of the freeway in their community.

[2] The new concrete road included the Calf Robe Bridge over the Bow River and an interchange at 43 Avenue SE, now called Peigan Trail.

[2] The next section, then intended to be the final segment, extended Deerfoot to Highway 22X (now Stoney Trail) on the altered alignment east of the river.

The original configuration of the interchange was modified in 1983 to add a loop ramp for traffic turning northbound onto Deerfoot Trail from eastbound Memorial.

[16]: 21–24  The last set of traffic lights was removed in 2005 upon completion of the interchange at Douglasdale Boulevard, making the entire length of Deerfoot Trail a freeway.

[16]: 25 In an effort to reduce head-on collisions caused by vehicles crossing over the grass median in north Calgary, the installation of high tension cable barriers was completed in the first half of 2007.

[68] The ramp was modified to first curve north and then loop back underneath itself, extending the merge distance before the three southbound lanes crossed Ogden Road and then the Bow River.

[70] The project included a controversial $470,000 piece of public art, a 17-metre (56 ft) tall blue ring called "Travelling Light" that lies on the north side of 96 Avenue between the railway and Nose Creek.

[71] Highly visible from Deerfoot, the ring received national attention and was called "awful" and "terrible" by Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi,[71] and "an example of bureaucracy run amok" by Councillor Jyoti Gondek.

Ultimately, a large cloverstack interchange is planned with left-turn movements handled by third-level directional flyovers providing free-flowing access to and from Deerfoot Trail.

The proposed ultimate configuration would require acquisition of land from adjacent properties for the construction of the flyovers and other modifications to Glenmore Trail.

[82] The study aimed to address Deerfoot's problems overall, as opposed to localized solutions that could simply shift traffic bottlenecks to another section of the freeway.

[82] Five short-term options were presented in May 2017;[4] they included a braided ramp in south Calgary between Southland Drive and Anderson Road, a jughandle intersection at 32 Avenue NE and 12 Street NE, left turn restrictions on McKnight Boulveard east of Deerfoot, and a pair of new northbound on-ramps between McKnight Boulevard and Airport Trail.

[84] In 2017, the City of Calgary began work to construct a 2-lane bridge for bus rapid transit over Deerfoot Trail south of 17 Avenue SE.

As part of Calgary Transit's developing network of bus-only routes, the new bridge does not interchange with Deerfoot Trail and was completed in late 2018.

[85] In March 2019, Transportation Minister Brian Mason announced plans for $478 million worth of improvements to a 21-kilometre (13 mi) stretch of Deerfoot between Beddington Trail in the north and Anderson Road in the south.