New managed toll lanes being built in the median of the SH-288 freeway in an image provided by the Company.
The ACS Group has informed CNMV that Iridium, its concessions subsidiary, has reached an agreement, through its North American subsidiary ACS Infrastructure Development, to compensate its missing 21.62% stake in the North American company Blueridge Transportation Group (BTG), the concession , to buy a 17-kilometer section of the SH-288 highway in Houston, Texas. The agreement is worth 450 million dollars, around 391 million euros at the current exchange rate, and once signed, the Spanish group will have 100% concession of the road. The section, which includes two lanes in each direction, uses the so-called dynamic toll, which sets tariffs based on traffic volume (Manage Lane) and guarantees users that they can drive at a certain speed.
More information
The company said in a statement that the concession is part of a 52-year public-private partnership contract awarded by the Texas Department of Transportation in 2015 to the Iridium-led consortium that also includes the group’s contractors, ACS Dragados USA and Pulice construction. “This contract includes the financing, design, construction and operation of four new toll lanes in the center of the corridor and its access ramps, the rehabilitation and improvement of the roads and junctions of the existing freeway, and access to the hospital complex known as the Texas Medical Center.” The plant opened in 2020 to relieve traffic congestion and an average of 160,000 vehicles pass through this corridor every day, “of which about 14,000 choose to use the new toll lanes”.
Hot water in the US
Spanish construction companies have been positioning themselves strongly in the North American market for years. Iridium now has six public-private partnership agreements in the United States with management value in excess of €6,000 million. ACS accumulates 15 transport infrastructure assets with an administrative value of more than 20,000 million euros in the country. In its construction area, a few weeks ago it was announced the last major contract won by the group chaired by Florentino Pérez: Dragados has been selected by the United States Navy for the construction of a concrete dry dock at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam in Hawaii for an amount of 2,840 million dollars (almost 2,700 million euros). Also last month, Panasonic Energy selected a consortium of Turner Construction (part of ACS Group) and Yates to build a $4 billion electric vehicle battery factory in De Soto, Kansas ) to build.
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