Artist-designed crosswalk, White Rock

Waves, sand and sky in custom aggregate-reinforced TrafficPatterns, an artist's design for a downtown White Rock crossing, installed spring 2025.

White Rock is a waterfront town, and this downtown crossing carries the shoreline across the road: a band of sand at one end, then water in two blues with white wave lines running through it, all held between white borders. The design is an artist's. The brief for the installer was to reproduce it exactly, at street scale, in a material that would take traffic.

Square One installed it in spring 2025 in TrafficPatterns preformed thermoplastic. The sheets are cut to the artwork before they arrive on site and then heat-fused to the pavement in place, which is how a curve drawn on paper keeps its line on the road. The manufacturer publishes the sheet at 125 mil with anti-skid elements throughout, and says a crossing can be open to traffic within minutes of application, which matters on a downtown street that cannot close for long.

The photographs show the crossing between new residential towers and the shops on the far side, with the tactile strip at the kerb and the red-brown sidewalk bands picking up the colour of the sand. A municipality or business district commissioning crosswalk art should ask for the artwork to be prepared as cut thermoplastic sheets, so what goes into the road is what the artist drew.