The City of London needed pedestrian safety and dedicated transit lanes in the same corridor. TrafficPatternsXD and red MMAX each did the job they are built for.
London, Ontario
A bus rapid transit corridor asks a road surface to do two different jobs in the same few hundred metres, and they are not the same job.
The crossings have to survive concentrated pedestrian and vehicle traffic while staying high-contrast enough to read at speed, in rain, at dusk. The transit lanes have to be unmistakably a transit lane — a continuous colour field that tells a driver, without a sign, that this space is not theirs — and they have to go in without shutting the corridor down.
One material rarely does both well. On the London East Link BRT, the City used two.
The crossings: TrafficPatternsXD
Aggregate-reinforced preformed thermoplastic at 150 mil, heat-fused into the asphalt.
The aggregate runs through the full cross-section at an 8–9 Mohs rating, so the skid resistance — 60 BPN under ASTM E303 — does not wear off with the top layer. That matters at a BRT crossing more than almost anywhere else on a network: buses brake, turn and pull in at the same spot, all day, and the wear concentrates into a few square metres.
Service life on XD is 10+ years.
The lanes: red MMAX
Methyl methacrylate resin, applied as a continuous coloured lane treatment.
MMAX cures traffic-ready in 45 to 60 minutes. In an active transit corridor that number is the specification. It means the work goes in fast, without the community disruption a multi-day closure creates, and the lane is carrying buses again the same shift.
It also applies at +3°C and rising, which extends the working season in an Ontario build calendar, and embedded aggregate gives it a non-slip surface from day one.
Why the split matters
Bus lanes fail where the loads concentrate: stop pads, turning movements, queue jumps. Painted treatments in those positions are typically gone within a season. MMAX holds its colour there.
Crossings fail differently — they lose contrast and they lose grip. Aggregate-reinforced thermoplastic is built for that failure mode instead.
Combining the two gave the City of London one corridor with two materials, each doing the job it is built for. That is usually the right answer when a project is asking a surface to be both a safety device and an identity.
Specifying a BRT corridor
If you are working on one now, the two questions worth settling early are how long you can hold the corridor for installation, and where on the alignment the wear actually concentrates. Those two answers usually choose the materials for you.
See MMAX · See TrafficPatternsXD · Bus lanes and transit corridors
