Largest portion of the bridge stock in almost any country and bridge owning organisation consists on ordinary bridges that has short or medium spans and are now deteriorating due to aging, etc. Therefore, it is becoming an important social concern to develop and put to practical use simple and efficient health monitoring systems for existing short and medium span (10-30m) bridges. In this paper, one practical solution to the problem for condition assessment of short and medium span bridges was discussed. A vehicle-based measurements with a public bus as part of a public transit system (called "Bus monitoring system") has been developed to capable of detecting damage that may affect the structural safety of a bridge from long term vibration measurement data collected while the vehicle (bus) crossed the target bridges. This paper systematically describes how the system has been developed. The bus monitoring system aims to detect the transition from the damage acceleration period, in which the structural safety of an aged bridge declines sharply, to the deterioration period by continually monitoring the bridge of interest. To evaluate the practicality of the newly developed bus monitoring system, it has been fieldtested over a period of about four years by using an in-service fixed-route bus operating on a bus route in the city of Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. The verification results thus obtained are also descrived in this paper. This study also evaluates the sensitivity of “characteristic deflection”, which is a bridge (health) condition indicator used by the bus monitoring system, in damage detection. Sensitivity of “characteristic deflection” is verified by introducing artificial damage into a bridge that has ended its service life and is awaiting removal.

In this study, as one solution to the problem for condition assessment of existing short- and medium-span reinforced/prestressed concrete bridges, a new monitoring method using a public bus as part of a public transit system (bus monitoring system) is proposed, along with safety indices, namely, characteristic deflection, which is relatively free from the influence of dynamic disturbances due to such factors as the roughness of the road surface, and a structural anomaly parameter. A basic study was conducted by using the results of technical verification experiments and numerical analysis simulation. This paper describes the details of not only how to assess the bridge condition by public bus vibration measured in operating on Ube City bus network as a specific example for verify the system but also what kind of consideration we need to apply the system to existing bridges in overseas country. And, the degrees of abnormality of the monitored bridges were expressed with the "inspection necessity level" to enable local governments to prioritize their bridge maintenance needs quantitatively.