UBC & Musqueam Crosswalk: Two Crests, One Surface
At the intersection of University Boulevard and Wesbrook Mall, on the UBC campus, there is a crosswalk that carries more than traffic. The surface itself is a collaborative design — UBC and Musqueam crests woven together across the asphalt, acknowledging that the campus stands on unceded Musqueam territory.
We installed that crosswalk. I want to write about what it took to get it right, because the technical and the ceremonial sides of this job were equally weighted.
The Brief
The design came out of conversations between UBC and the Musqueam Indian Band. The decision to render the two crests together — not side by side, but woven — was a deliberate signal about the nature of the relationship the campus wants to acknowledge with every pedestrian who crosses that intersection.
From our side, the brief was straightforward in what it asked for and demanding in what it implied. The pattern had to read cleanly at the scale of a vehicle driver's sightline. The colours had to hold their exact hue under BC UV. The install had to be respectful of the cultural weight the design carried.
The Product: TrafficPatterns
We used TrafficPatterns preformed thermoplastic for this install. It's the product we reach for when a design has cultural or institutional significance, because it holds colour and detail longer than any other pavement-marking system we work with.
The sheets come pre-cut from CAD artwork. The install crew torches the asphalt and the sheet simultaneously, and the material fuses directly into the road surface as it cools. What you get is a marking that is structurally part of the pavement — not sitting on top of it, not waiting to peel at the edges after one winter.
Expected service life on a UBC campus install in this colour spec is five to seven years at full saturation, with gradual softening after that. The 2020-era TrafficPatterns crosswalks we installed around the Lower Mainland are still reading clearly today.
What the Surface Does Now
The crosswalk carries pedestrians the way any crosswalk does. It slows drivers the way any well-designed decorative crosswalk does. And it makes a statement, every time someone crosses it, that the campus takes its relationship with the Musqueam Nation seriously enough to render it into the ground itself.
This is the category of public work that earns the trust the University and the Nation placed in the install team. We're honoured to have been asked.
If you're working on a project with First Nations partnership or campus-scale reconciliation visibility, we work with engineering teams and cultural liaisons across BC on sensitive installs of this kind. Get in touch for a specification conversation.
