Made in response to this post – on the realization that there aren’t many examples of solarpunk art set in winter.

One thing I’ve been considering is if snow rollers, or a modern take on packing down snow instead of plowing it out of the way, might make a comeback in a society with fewer cars and snowy winters. Around here, they used to use sleighs in the winter, and snow rollers pulled by oxen to flatten the roads for travel. The idea of shoveling an entire road bare so you could drive on it would probably have seemed pretty extravagant to them.

It’s an idea that’s been rattling around in my head for awhile. There’s a sizable contingent in solarpunk spaces who are very much in favor of society deprioritizing cars and focusing on trains and other public transit options. If our solarpunk society has resource limitations, as most societies do, and they’re prioritizing big infrastructure stuff like trains, ropeways, etc, it’s possible that roads would fall apart pretty quick.

Around here at least, roads, bridges, etc require constant maintenance to remain anywhere approaching drivable. Winter breaks them with frost heaves and potholes, spring turns their footings to muddy slop or washes them away in floods. The maintenance is constant and expensive.

I feel like a society where most people take the train, and ride bikes, would find themselves wondering why they need to maintain a lot of these roads to a drivable level. Especially if this solarpunk community is rebuilding after our current society goes through a span of societal crumbles and leaves them with even more infrastructure debt. I tend to set these pictures in that period of post-post-apoclyptic rebuilding, after places like my hometown have already condensed back towards smaller, denser villages, rather than the sprawling pseudo-suburbia we have now. (Out of necessary due to societal crumbles and cars/gas becoming less reliable.) Towns here used to have multiple small clumps of houses and industry built around walking, with big spans of farms and forest between them where you’d catch a wagon or car ride to a town with a train station.

So in this setting, I imagine trains and ropeways link these small, dense villages. Primary roads to other towns are maintained, along with ones leading to nearby farms, but there are probably a lot of abandoned developments an impractical distance out, linked by roads that have been mostly left to break up and wash out just because the society doesn’t have the means or a strong reason to maintain them. Perhaps they’re letting some areas rewild, maybe they only make jaunts out on these old roads to disassemble houses for all their useful parts, and to return the lots to nature.

I imagine that sometimes, the ropeways don’t follow the main roads. Perhaps they take more direct routs, or cross spans where bridges have collapsed and haven’t been replaced. Most of the time they’d follow some kind of road, just because that makes it easier for the work crews who build and maintain them, but perhaps these roads aren’t active enough to justify plowing all winter. Seasonality is a good concept for solarpunk societies, I feel like a solarpunk society would consider seasonal means of travel.

I imagine a lot of these secondary roads are used as winter trails, packed down with snow groomers and traveled by people on cross country skis, snowshoes, sleighs, perhaps electric snowmobiles or those bicycle/sled contraptions.

That’s where I set this one. A seasonal road used as a winter trail, followed for some of its course by a ropeway. On either end of that cable, the villages are lit and warm, their streets plowed, but out here, its just the quiet static hiss of snow falling, the creak of the pulleys overhead, and the rumbling of the groomer crew making a pass to pack the trail.

This image and all the postcards are CC-BY, use them how you like.