First of all, you would be able to serve every community up there with the airships. There is no community in Manitoba that would not be served if that were the case.
There would still be some community ice roads built, but they may not have to be built to the outside. The people who live there take advantage of the winter to visit their relatives in the communities. They'll drive back and forth on the ice roads to visit the various communities, but they can do that on very small ice roads in pickup trucks and otherwise. It's the carrying of tractor trailers where you need the thick ice.
There's no reason we wouldn't be able to serve them all. I will give you a snapshot cost of the price difference. The Province of Manitoba has looked at a plan to put permanent gravel roads on the east side of Lake Winnipeg that would serve a population of 15,200 people. It's 852 kilometres of gravel roads, and the price tag is $2.8 billion. It's a tremendous cost, and it's partly because you're building across muskeg, swamp, outcrops, and permafrost. It's a really difficult terrain. That doesn't even deal with the issues like the caribou and the wildlife that get disturbed by building roads through this area.
In my mind, the roads are really not a very good solution, and they're certainly not a competitive solution versus the airship, which would be able to serve all these communities.