The Peter-Merian bridge, built in 1901, is an important infrastructure component of the Basel SBB train station. As part of planned maintenance project, the shear load capacity of the bridge was re-evaluated under the current SIA 269 design standard. It was shown that extensive retrofitting measures would have to be taken for the bridge to fulfill those standards.

To avoid these costly and complicated measures, we conducted a probabilistic analysis of the bridge loads. This analysis showed that even without additional measures, the bridge satisfies the requirements given by the current design standard. This result led to significant cost savings by avoiding retrofitting measures.