Winter road service is essential to maintaining safe, reliable, and efficient transportation systems during cold-weather conditions. Snow, ice, and freezing temperatures create hazardous driving conditions that significantly increase the risk of collisions, delays, and road closures. Timely winter services—such as snow removal, ice control, anti-icing treatments, and roadway monitoring—help reduce these risks by improving traction, visibility, and overall driving conditions. Ensuring roads remain passable during winter weather is critical for protecting motorists, pedestrians, cyclists and maintenance personnel alike.

With the advance of innovative technologies and practices in recent years such as digitalization of spreaders, use of environmentally friendly anti/de-icing mixtures, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and AI-based Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS), winter service maintenance can be done more effectively while helping to reduce costs and environmental impacts.

Sustainable development and environmental protection are fundamental objectives, driving us to continually improve our strategies and practices in winter maintenance. Sharing knowledge and experience with others is essential to advance towards those objectives.

The ambitious goal of the Snow and Ice Data Book (SIDB) is to share experiences in winter maintenance from various countries. Initiated nearly 25 years ago, it has been regularly updated every four years in conjunction with the International Winter Road Congress, making each edition both timely and successful. This version provides an overview of winter maintenance practices from 23 countries. Of these, 17 entries are updates from the previous version with the remaining 6 countries (Poland, Slovenia, China, Iran, The Netherlands, and Ukraine) being new entries, which is very encouraging.

The XVII World Winter Service and Road Resilience Congress held in Chambéry, France, from March 10 to 13, 2026, offers the opportunity to release the seventh version of the SIDB. The 2026 SIDB features a consistent format, with the same sequence of chapters contributed by each country.