Structural Characterization of Modern Highway Overcrossings—Case Study

This paper revisits the mechanical characterization of the main substructure elements of highway overcrossings in an effort to build a more balanced methodology to compute the earthquake response of seismically protected bridges accounting for the effects of soil–structure interaction. Various macroscopic constitutive laws that are well known in literature are summarized and synthesized in a way that can be incorporated in reduced-order stick models used in practice. Here, we discuss the required sophistication level of the proposed macroscopic constitutive laws in order to capture the leading mechanical behavior of each substructural element without adding unnecessary complications when incorporated in a stick model idealization of the bridge.