Ferrovial, the Spanish infrastructure company listed on the Nasdaq, just won the largest single construction contract in Tennessee history: a $9.2 billion project to overhaul a 26-mile stretch of I-24 between Nashville and Murfreesboro, one of the most congested corridors in the region. It is also Tennessee's first public-private partnership of this kind, and skeptics are already asking the obvious question: when a private company builds your highway, who actually benefits?

The project is called the I-24 Southeast Choice Lanes. The name tells you the model. Ferrovial, alongside partners Transurban and Tikehau Star Infra under a consortium called DriveTN, will build new lanes on top of the existing free highway. Drivers who want a guaranteed faster trip pay a toll to use those lanes. Drivers who don't pay keep their existing lanes, which, in theory, become less crowded once some traffic shifts over.

The theory has worked elsewhere

Ferrovial has run this same model on Virginia's I-66 Express corridor, where it reports that similar managed lanes cut peak-hour travel times by up to 50%. It operates comparable systems in Washington D.C., Charlotte, and Dallas-Fort Worth. The pitch to Tennessee is consistent: the free lanes don't disappear, and the congestion relief spreads to everyone, not just the people paying the toll.

Whether that plays out depends on how many drivers can actually afford to opt in regularly. Choice lanes have a well-documented equity problem: they work best for people with flexible schedules and expendable income, which means lower-wage commuters often stay stuck in the free lanes while a faster road runs alongside them. Nashville's growth has pulled in exactly that mix of residents, from tech workers to warehouse and logistics employees who need the I-24 corridor to reach jobs southeast of the city.

A winning bid is not a finished road

Ferrovial's announcement came in August, but the company's CEO frames this in terms of decades, not months. The project still needs to be financed, permitted in detail, built, and then operated under a long-term concession. That is a lot of execution risk spread across a long timeline.

The company's finances look stable enough to carry the weight. Its first-half 2026 results showed a 21.6% increase in operating profit (before interest, tax and depreciation) on a comparable basis, reaching roughly 746 million euros, with U.S. highways driving most of that growth. North American roads sent 357 million euros in dividends back to the parent company in the same period. The company's construction order book hit an all-time high of 18 billion euros.

The one number that cuts the other way: net profit for the first half of 2026 came in at 258 million euros, against 540 million euros in the same period a year earlier. The company attributes the drop largely to one-time asset sale gains that inflated 2025's figure, so the comparison is somewhat unfair. But operating profit climbing while reported profit falls is the kind of thing worth watching on a project of this scale.

There is also a concentration question. North America now accounts for nearly half of Ferrovial's entire construction order book. The company also bid on a highway project near Atlanta in July. A lot of its near-term growth story is riding on one country, one regulatory environment, and one political appetite for toll-based infrastructure.

For Nashville commuters, the most honest framing is this: congestion on I-24 is real, it is expensive in lost time, and it is getting worse as the metro area grows. A private consortium willing to spend $9.2 billion to fix it is genuinely offering something. The price of that offer is a road where faster travel has a price attached to it, and the full cost, in dollars, in equity, and in who bears the risk if the project runs long or over budget, will take years to become clear.

The road between Nashville and Murfreesboro will be rebuilt. The terms of who benefits are still being written.