Abstract To effectively alleviate traffic pressure of urban arterial roads, optimizing one-way traffic organization is the key to bring microcirculation transportation network into full play. Aiming at reducing the saturation of arterial roads and microcirculation roads, the paper develops the bi-level programming model for optimizing one-way traffic organization with consideration of the maximum saturation restriction. The decision-making variable of the upper level programming is the scheme of one-way traffic organization of branch roads and the optimization targets are to minimize the average saturation of arterial roads and to minimize the excess of saturation over its maximum of arterial roads. The lower level programming is an equilibrium traffic assignment problem under the restrictions of the capacity of arterial roads and branch roads and the maximum saturation. The genetic algorithm is adopted to solve the model. The traffic conditions of arterial roads and microcirculation roads before and after optimizing of one-way traffic organization were compared by an example, which also proves the effectiveness of one-way traffic organization of microcirculation network. The proposed model provides an optimization method for one-way traffic organization of microcirculation network.