Cost-effectiveness in design is considered for determining the target reliability of concrete bridges under seismic actions. This objective can be achieved based on the economic optimization of the expected life-cycle cost of a bridge, which includes initial cost, direct losses, and indirect losses of a bridge due to strong earthquakes over its lifetime. A separating factor is defined to consider the redundancy of a transportation network. The Park-Ang damage model is employed to define the damage of a bridge under seismic action, and a Monte Carlo method based on the DRAIN-2DX program is developed to assess the failure probability of a bridge. The results for an example bridge analyzed in this paper show that the optimal target failure probability depends on the traffic volume carried by the bridge and is between 1.0×10^-3 to 3.0×10^-3 over a life of 50 years.