To study the congestion of interrupted flow on urban roads, a comprehensive evaluation method is proposed. First, based on the results of correlation analysis between different parameters of interrupted flow, the traffic parameters of interrupted traffic flow are divided into two categories： the basic parameters and the operation parameters. Polynomial regression is used to formulize the nonlinear relationships between the basic parameters and the operation parameters. Then, the congestion model incorporating both operational and volume characteristics of traffic flow is proposed. The inputs of the model are the basic parameters, while the output is a dimensionless index value between 0 and 1. Finally, the proposed methods are compared with existing evaluation measures of congestion. Results show that the proposed indices can capture the variation of both the basic parameters and the operation parameters, which is more balanced compared with the existing evaluation measures.
