New Tools Available to Practicing Engineers for the Seismic Design of Bridges

There have been many recent changes in the field of earthquake engineering for highway bridges as a result of lessons learned from past events, funded research, and the development of a new performance driven design philosophy based on consensus of best practice in the U.S. and abroad. This paper provides a brief summary of the current state of the practice for bridge design and retrofit with particular attention given to the applied research that the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research's (MCEER's) team has conducted for Federal Highway Administration and the resulting reference materials that were produced.