Auckland’s Congestion Pricing
Toward Net-Zero Emissions: Simulating Congestion Charging Impacts with Agent-Based Traffic Models
Auckland has the highest traffic volume in New Zealand. The city suffers from persistent congestion and escalating vehicle emissions. The traffic situation is expected to worsen as the city continues to expand. While the municipal government’s proposed a congestion charge scheme in The Congestion Question (TCQ) report with various scenarios, these plans are based on a strategic transport model in a macroscopic scale, that overlooks the spatial and temporal variations for mobility assessments. Microscopic models, such as the Project Monty by the Ministry of Transport, are challenging for policymakers to adopt due to computational demands. Monty itself is an amazing tool per se, as it can simulate the entire New Zealand from a 1:1 scale vehicle simulation. However, as the model is big and intertwined in many aspects, it is difficult to be shared with research groups or developers to work on a neighbourhood or city scale.
In our TIF project, we seek to gather a transdisciplinary group to accomplish the following goals:
- Develop a meso-scale (at 10x20km scale), open-source, agent-based traffic simulation for Greater Auckland: This model will integrate spatiotemporal mobility to assess congestion-charging scenarios more accurately than macroscopic models
- Establish a network of a working group: Focus on congestion, net zero, air quality, and public health, including Māori co-PIs in the project development phase.
The project started on 1 January 2025 and will end in September 2026. We will use the NZ$23,000 for workshops (huis), roundtables and hiring RAs for geospatial analysis and literature reviews focusing on global cities that have implemented Congestion Pricing or Low Emission Zones.
While these analyses are ongoing, the main work in 2026 will be developing the ABM simulation using MATSim and seeking initial feedback from the council and academics.