More than 20 years ago, when Ferrovial first brought the public-private partnership model to North Texas through its subsidiary Cintra, its success depended on more than capital and construction expertise. It depended on finding the right people – established local experts who understood how public agencies and private partners could work together for the benefit of the communities they serve.
That approach has defined the LBJ Express, North Tarrant Express and NTE 35W corridors ever since, and it’s a big reason those projects now move hundreds of thousands of drivers every day. Getting there required years of collaboration between Ferrovial, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), and a network of local leaders who helped bridge those institutions.
David Laney was one of those leaders. He recently presided over his final meeting as chairman of the board of TEXpress Lanes, the entity overseeing these three corridors in partnership with TxDOT. He is retiring after serving as chairman since the earliest days of the North Texas projects, making him the only person to have held that role.
Relationships as Infrastructure
Building a highway is an engineering challenge. Sustaining one for decades, across changing political administrations, evolving public expectations and the everyday needs of a growing region, is something else entirely. It requires patience, transparency, and partners who bring more than technical know-how to the table.
That is the thinking behind Ferrovial’s approach to stakeholder engagement in every market it enters: seek out people with deep local credibility, invest in the relationship for the long haul, and give those partners a genuine role in shaping how a project serves its community. In North Texas, Laney was a defining example of what that approach looks like in practice.
His background made him uniquely suited to the role. Laney is the former chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission, which oversees TxDOT, and previously chaired the board of directors of Amtrak. Across those positions, he helped shape transportation policy at the state and national level long before construction began on the North Texas projects. That vantage point on how public infrastructure gets built and sustained shaped every board meeting, negotiation and milestone he was part of.
A Model for the Long Term
Laney’s tenure is a reminder of what makes these partnerships work over time: not a single agreement or groundbreaking, but a sustained relationship between institutions and the people who represent them. His experience with TxDOT, NTTA and Amtrak gave him credibility with public agencies and private partners alike, and that trust is what allowed the LBJ Express, North Tarrant Express and NTE 35W corridors to move from concept to daily reality for hundreds of thousands of North Texas drivers.
As Ferrovial continues to expand its public-private partnership work in new markets, the North Texas experience, and Laney’s role in it, stands as a model: success depends as much on the relationships built along the way as on the roads themselves.