This paper describes work done on the original PARAMICS project, which was developed for the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre to examine parallel microscopic road traffic simulation. The simulator, constructed originally for a Thinking Machines Connection Machine (CM-200), uses a data-parallel approach to simulate approximately 200,000 vehicles on 20,000 miles of roadway. More recent work has focused on the use of a message-passing paradigm, with a 256-node CRAY T3D as the target machine. The message-passing version of PARAMICS, PARAMICS-MP, is inherently scalable and can model many smaller networks on a broad range of platforms.