The traffic system is one of the core requirements of a civilized world and the development of the country depends on it in many aspects. In Ethiopia, the number of vehicles and pedestrians is increasing at a high rate from time to time. Excessive numbers of traffic on roads and improper control of traffic create traffic congestion. Uncontrolled traffic congestion hinders the transportation of goods and commuters from place to place and increases the volume of carbon emitted into the air. It can also either hampers or stagnates schedule, business, and commerce. Many images and video processing approaches have been researched in the literature on how to detect traffic congestion. One such approach is that of using background and foreground subtraction, convolutional neural network, and Average frame difference and deep learning method used to detect traffic congestion from different video sources. From the review one-stage object detector identified as the best methods to detect traffic congestion with acceptable accuracy and speed. In this study one-stage object detectors are used to detect traffic congestion from recorded video. Data is collected from different video footage and frames extracted from videos to prepare a dataset for the thesis. The extracted frames were labeled manually as congested and uncongested. To train, the models pre-trained weights were used. YOLOV3 and YOLOV5 model used for experimentation. Accuracy and speed metrics used to evaluate the performance of the models. A YOLOV3 model achieved 41.6 FPS and 68.6 % mAP on a testing dataset.