Today, the Communauté d’Agglomération du Centre Littoral de Guyane (CACL) signed a 33 ½-year public-private partnership (P3) contract with the project company IBYS for the design, construction, financing and maintenance of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network. IBYS is comprised of Colas Projects, a Colas Group company dedicated to major projects, Ribal Travaux Publics, a Colas Group company in French Guiana, and FIDEPPP2 investment fund.

The project involves the construction of two BRT lines, for a total length of 10.1 km, which will serve 21 stations along the key points in the city of Cayenne, such as the Andrée-Rosemon Hospital and the University of French Guiana, thus recreating links between districts.

In addition to the construction of the two bus lines and the stations, the designer-build consortium, made up of Colas Projects and Ribal TP, will also build a park & drive lot, two multimodal interchange hubs, and a maintenance and storage center. It will also partially redevelop the surrounding public spaces, thus bolstering urban regeneration across the city of Cayenne. The network will be opened to traffic by mid-2023, after a period of 42 months of studies and construction work.

Ribal TP will also maintain the two lines over a period of 30 years for an amount of 45 million euros, backed by a dedicated 100% local team.

The contract value for the construction work amounts to 135 million euros, financed by a combination of equity provided by Colas and FIDEPPP2, debt provided by RIVAGE, an institutional investor, and public funding provided by the CACL, France and the European Union. 

The signing of this PPP contract highlights Colas’ expertise in setting up and managing contracts with financing, and in the construction of urban transport infrastructure. 

Over the past five years, Colas has won numerous BRT design-build contracts in France and in the French Overseas zones , notably in Lens, Bayonne, Saint-Brieuc, Pau, Rouen, Lorient, Nouméa, Le Lamentin, Fort-de-France. 

The Cayenne BRT is the second major P3 infrastructure contract won by the Colas Group in 2019, in the wake of Liège Belgium Tramway, signed in January.