PACHUCA, Mexico – Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim presented Monday the first “smart freeway” in the country, the Arco-Norte capital bypass, which will cross four states with a ring road 223 kilometers (139 miles) long.

With a combined public and private investment of 6.23 billion pesos ($461 million), the project will have taken 3½ years to complete when finished as planned by the end of July.

“Despite the crisis, the financial resources exist to fund these projects,” Slim said at the ceremony, after describing the freeway as an “avant-garde operation” and praising the Mexican government’s infrastructure plan.

For the magnate, there are many possibilities in the field of Mexican infrastructure and his companies stand ready to bid on such projects.

The Arco-Norte freeway was undertaken by Slim’s Carso Infraestructures and Communications and by Ideal.

The freeway, which skirts Mexico City through the states of Puebla, Mexico, Hidalgo and Tlaxcala, incorporates a network of optic fiber that transmits information on the state of the road in real time to the control center at Pachuca, Hidalgo.

With 28 cameras, 14 radars, three weather stations and access to the Internet, Arco-Norte seeks to offer users detailed information on the state of the freeway before they set out or during their drive. Motorists will pay 1.30 pesos per kilometer (14 cents per mile) traveled.

The freeway will attract part of the traffic that would otherwise go through the capital, particularly heavy vehicles.

Besides the savings in time and operating costs, Slim said that the Arco-Norte will spare the city 108,000 tons of CO2 emissions.

With nearly 20 million inhabitants and the traffic of some 5 million vehicles a day, Mexico City is responsible for 9.1 percent of the nation’s CO2 emissions.

Solar-energy panels power the freeway’s smart systems.

Building the Arco-Norte, which created 2,100 direct jobs and 10,500 indirect jobs, is part of the infrastructure plan that the government laid out for the period between 2006 and 2012 to make the country more competitive.

The budget for the 2009 plan is 50 billion pesos ($3.7 billion). EFE