Indirect bridge health monitoring requires an instrumented vehicle with an accelerometer to scan bridge vibration. The indirect method is more practical than the conventional direct method due to its cost efficiency and mobility. However, the vehicle�s own response may pollute the recorded vertical acceleration signal. This paper utilizes a newly developed contact-point calculation method to show its efficiency to reflect the true vibration of bridges. A finite element model is developed for a vehicle placed in stationary state at mid-span of a bridge that is excited by a moving vehicle. Two cases considering different property of the stationary vehicle and different speed of the moving vehicle are developed. The contact-point response is extracted from the stationary vehicle response using MATLAB. The results show the discrepancy between the stationary vehicle and bridge responses. In contrast, good agreement between the contact-point and bridge responses is presented in the time and frequency domains. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021.