Introduction : It's critical to recognise that improvement is occurring gradually on a global Traffic congestion cause serious concerns for urbanites all over the world. However, most studies related to traffic congestion have been limited to large metropolitan cities only. But for sustainable urban development traffic congestion issues faced by small cities must be discussed. Hence, this study has been carried out with the purpose to identify and prioritize the significant factors responsible for traffic congestion in small cities (population less than 500,000) in India. Prioritization of factors and sub-factors responsible for traffic congestion will be helpful in knowing the commuters’ perspectives about traffic congestion issues and useful in developing mitigating strategies to curb the congestion problem in resourcedeprived small cities in India. Further, the analysis of significant factors causing traffic congestion could be beneficial to ease traffic congestion, in terms of planning, operation, and management and may increase behavioural corrections of drivers and pedestrians. For this research study, various responsible factors for traffic congestion have been identified by reviewing the past literature and then their relative role in traffic congestion has been determined by prioritizing them through Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, a multi-criteria decision-making tool (MCDM). A total of fifteen factors, considered responsible for traffic congestion, have been identified and further classified under four key factors: Socioeconomic, Technical, Human, and Random. In order to conduct pair-wise comparisons of various factors and sub-factors relevant to the study, commuters from four small cities in Bihar, India, were surveyed. The AHP-based traffic model results found technical factors (0.32) as the most responsible factors which cause traffic congestion in the study area followed by human (0.27), random (0.23), and socioeconomic (0.19) factors. Moreover, the global weight of sub-factors revealed poor transport infrastructure, irresponsible behavior of the drivers, increased informal transport operators, special events, and accidents as the top five sub-factors responsible for traffic congestion in the study area than other sub-factors