Abstract. Tra c congestion is a major issue that plagues many urban road networks large and small. Tra c engineers are now leaning towards Intelligent Tra c Systems as many physical changes to road networks are costly or infeasible. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have become a popular paradigm for intelligent solutions to tra c management problems. There are many MAS approaches to tra c management that utilise market mechanisms. In market-based approaches, drivers "pay" to use the roadways. However, a major issue with many of these solutions is that they require technology that, as yet, does not exist or is not widely available. For example, they rely on a special software agent that resides within the vehicle. This "vehicle agent" is responsible for participating in the market mechanism and communicating with the transportation infrastructure. In this paper, an auction-based tra c controller is proposed which exploits all the benefits of market mechanisms without the need for a vehicle agent. Experimental results show that such a controller is better at reducing delay and increasing throughput in a simulated city, as compared to fixed-time signal controllers.