Critical Assessment of the Seismic Fragility of Bridges as a System

This study finds the overall seismic fragility of an integral abutment bridge typology while integrating the demands of all damageable components, as very high to moderate correlations are identified between most component pairs. It highlights significant misjudgement of the bridge vulnerability when represented through a single component, particularly up to moderately high ranges of the adopted intensity measures, where the bridge shows considerable relative fragilities with all components. In most instances, conventional peak ground acceleration tentatively overestimates individual fragilities and underestimates the relative fragilities between individual components, and between each component and the bridge compared to the optimal intensity measure.