The past studies primarily performed the deterministic dynamic analysis of vessel-bridge collision for a given collision event，which hardly reflected the contingency and probability characteristics of ship collision，as well as the damage evolution of bridge under impacts with various energy. For this reason，this study systematically investigated the vulnerability of a bridge under collisions of two typical vessels，where the residual capacity of bridge piers after vessel impacts was used as the damage assessment index. Firstly，a direct finite element （FE） simulation method was established to predict the residual capacity of axially-loaded RC column after lateral impact. The rationality of the simulation method was verified by the test results. Then，based on a typical continuous girder bridge，two different simplified FE model were established，compared and validated. By combining the validated simplified FE model and the response surface method，a vulnerability analysis method of the vessel-bridge collision was established，and the vulnerability curves of the bridge were obtained for the impacts of two kinds of typical ships. The results show that the response surface has good accuracy and is able to replace the complex nonlinear FE calculation；The response characteristics of the residual capacity of the pier are quite different for the impact of two types of vessels：the residual capacity of the pier under the impact of the bulbous-bow ship decreases uniformly with the increase of the ship speed，while the residual capacity is closely related to the critical ship speed under the impact of the barge and exhibits the bilinear characteristics so that the sample design needs to be segmented based on the critical speed；Under the same ship speed and quality，the probabilities of structural damage and failure caused by barge impacts are generally higher than those caused by bulbous-bow ship impacts，which should be paid special attention in the practical design.