Reversible lanes constitute an important solutions for sustainable transportation, with the aim to solve the practical problem of reversible lane optimization of urban road networks constrained by adjustment time. Considering the relationship between the number of lanes and the capacity of sections, a mixed-integer bilevel programming model of reversible lane optimization constrained by adjustment time is constructed in order to minimize the total travel time of the system. The results show that the model can effectively obtain the optimal strategy for any number of reversible sections subject to adjustment time constraints. With the increase of the number of reversible sections that can be optimized within the adjustment time, the cumulative reduced system time increases monotonically and the road network optimization effect improves, but as a whole, the optimization effect of the newly added reversible sections in each stage shows a decreasing trend. When the number of reversible sections that can be optimized within the adjustment time reaches a certain number, increasing the number of reversible sections will have a limited further effect on the overall system. For the reversible lane optimization problem of urban road networks, only efficient reversible sections need to be optimized to achieve a good optimization effect.