Downtown Woodbridge needed crosswalks that honoured its Heritage Conservation District character while surviving Canadian winters and snowplow blades. TrafficPatternsXD delivered the look of brick with no raised edges, season after season.
The Village of Woodbridge is a designated Heritage Conservation District, a historic main street environment where every design decision is evaluated against the character of buildings that have stood for over a century. When the City of Vaughan undertook a major streetscape improvement of Woodbridge Avenue, the crosswalk specification became one of the most challenging details on the project.
The goal: enhance pedestrian safety, reinforce the heritage village character, and create a streetscape worthy of the district. The constraint: real brick paving at intersections, beautiful in theory, a maintenance problem in a Canadian municipality where snowplows work the streets from November to April.
The problem with actual brick
Brick pavers at intersections create raised edges that snowplow blades catch and displace. Over time, the paver surface becomes uneven, a trip hazard for pedestrians and a maintenance burden for operations crews. In a heritage district where the aesthetic is non-negotiable, this creates an impossible choice: accept the maintenance cycle or compromise the design intent.
TrafficPatternsXD resolves the tension. Heavy-duty aggregate-reinforced preformed thermoplastic in brick and cobblestone patterns, stamped into the asphalt: no raised edges, no grout joints for snowplow blades to catch. The brick look comes from texture and colour.
What the City Experienced
Shirley Marsh, Project Manager of Urban Design for the City of Vaughan, described the outcome directly:
“The Woodbridge streetscape improvement required careful selection of plantings, street furniture, and paving materials. The City chose TrafficPatternsXD for all pedestrian crosswalks at intersections to enhance pedestrian zones and improve safety. The project had multiple goals: to beautify the street environment, create safe traffic circulation, enhance the heritage village character, ensure material durability, and enable efficient operations and maintenance. The team feels we successfully achieved these goals in the completion of the Woodbridge Avenue streetscape improvement project.”
It met all three goals at once: heritage character, operations and safety.
What makes TrafficPatternsXD different
TrafficPatternsXD is HUB's heavy-duty preformed thermoplastic, a 150 mil aggregate-reinforced material engineered for the highest-load applications in the HUB product range. BPN 65+ certified skid resistance provides wet-surface traction at crossings where pedestrian safety is the primary mandate. Heated and stamped into the asphalt, it survives snowplow cycles, de-icing chemicals and the freeze-thaw cycling that destroys surface paint and displaces paver systems.
For heritage districts like Woodbridge, the visual result is indistinguishable from traditional masonry at normal viewing distance, and the operational reality is dramatically better.
Installed by Thermo Design.
Specifying crosswalks in a heritage or character area? Contact HUB Surface Systems to discuss TrafficPatternsXD pattern options and installation requirements.
