The invention belongs to the technical field of harbor road design and relates to a cellular automata based design method of circular curve elements of bends of harbor roads. The method comprises the following steps: preliminarily determining the radius ranges and the arc length ranges of the circular curves to be designed; determining the maximum speeds and acceleration and deceleration probability of the vehicles by analyzing the safety and the comfort and treating the safety boundary conditions; establishing a simulation model of the cellular automata, determining the maximum speeds and acceleration and deceleration probability of the vehicles and designing car-following and lane-changing rules of the vehicles; and simplifying the types of the vehicles, converting the types of various vehicles into a single type, simulating the traffics in the harbor districts by changing the radii and the arc length of the circular curves of the bends of the harbor roads according to the established simulation model of the cellular automata, evaluating the simulation result and investigating whether the design scheme can meet the requirement of the traffic capacity. Compared with the traditional method, the design method of the invention has the advantage that the design scheme of the line shapes of the bends in the harbor districts is further consistent with the traffic characteristics inthe harbor districts.