Ice road

[8][9] Ice roads may be planned, built and maintained so as to remain safe and effective, and a number of guidelines have been published with information in these regards.

[13] The ability of an ice road to safely support the weight of a vehicle (or any other loads applied onto it), referred to as bearing capacity, is the primary concern when designing, building and using that structure.

Generally speaking, a vertically loaded ice cover will react in two ways: 1) it will sink, and 2) it will bend in flexure.

For standard traffic activities, guidelines typically use a simple empirical formula to determine the maximum vehicle weight that should be allowed on an ice road.

[11][15] This level of conservatism is justified because, unlike human-made materials such as steel or concrete, natural ice covers inherently contain a large amount of structural flaws (fractures, water and air pockets).

For industrial roads, the design may be less conservative so as to handle their functional requirements, i.e. higher A values can be used, but under the close supervision of a professional engineer.

[4][2] When using Gold's formula, a purely elastic response is assumed, which is, by definition, instantaneous and independent of loading time.

"If the celerity of these waves is the same as the vehicle speed, the deflection and the stresses in the ice sheet are amplified, similar to resonance in an oscillating system" (pp. 8–10).

Once the ice has reached the target thickness (via accelerated growth after removing the insulating effects of the snow), road construction per se may commence.

At that point, the ice is able to safely support the heavier equipment required for that phase, which mostly consists of artificial thickening using a pump or a spraying system.

[12][25] However, tire chains may be stored in the vehicle for emergency purposes;[2][4] they can also come in handy when traveling on a winter road with grades steeper than 8% on over-land segments.