In the four years she’s been leading Atlanta BeltLine bus tours, Heather Hussey-Coker said she hears the same sentiment over and over from participants.

“I started to see Atlanta.”

“Tons of people have been taking the tour just to better know the city. Ultimately, the BeltLine is going to do that,” said Hussey-Coker, a special projects coordinator with Atlanta BeltLine, Inc. The organization is in charge of planning and building the BeltLine, a 22-mile necklace of trails, transit, parks and development growing around the city’s abandoned rail-beds.

Friday morning, Jan. 21, the BeltLine kicked off another year of twice-weekly tours along the project’s loop.

The free three-hour tours continue most Friday and Saturday mornings, picking up and dropping off at the MARTA Inman Park-Reynoldstown station. The tours are free and open to the public. Reserved spots are filling up quickly on the BeltLine website.

The tour helps to sort through the complexities of the BeltLine, a decades-long undertaking that touches 45 neighborhoods and encompasses almost every aspect of urban life and development, from housing to watershed management to public art. First proposed in 1999 by a Georgia Tech graduate student, Ryan Gravel, the Beltline is taking observable shape. Several parks are nearing completion and many trail segments are walkable.

BeltLine volunteer Brandy Morrison served as narrator yesterday on the bus tour, which included 15 architecture students from Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta. Under the guidance of architecture professor Liz Martin, each student is designing a hypothetical Beltline transit hub located by City Hall East and the Whole Foods on Ponce De Leon Avenue.

The highlight of the tour is a stop at the otherwise off-limits Westside Reservoir Park and Bellwood Quarry in West Midtown, which is the future site of a 320-acre park along the BeltLine trail. For comparison’s sake, Piedmont Park is about 190 acres.

Peering into the 350-foot gulf of the quarry, surrounded by acres of grass fields, it’s hard to believe a city is so close. Eventually the quarry may hold 2.2 billion gallons of Chattahoochee River water, Morrison said, enough to sustain Atlanta in an emergency.

Currently, the Westside Reservoir Park is undergoing environmental restoration and is closed to the public. While the city of Atlanta waits for Beltline expansion to begin, Morrison said, it’s rented the area to filming crews from “Walking Dead” and the latest sequel in the “Fast and Furious” franchise, “Fast Five.”

Morrison continued the tour east, past Piedmont Hospital and what she considers one of the worst intersections in Atlanta -- Collier and Peachtree roads. The Beltline transit system will ease traffic jams for the hospital’s thousands of employees, Morrison said.

“Even if you got a fraction of those employees using the Beltline, you’re talking about taking hundreds, if not thousands, of cars off the road,” she said. "Really, the Beltline is going to be a new street for Atlanta.”

The next open BeltLine tour is in March, but Hussey-Coker said a seat or two is usually open for walk-ups and last-minute registrations. Sign up online or call 404-446-4400.