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The aero-structural design of bridges is mainly controlled by the deck cross-section design. Design modifications on bridge decks impact the deck aerodynamics and the deck mechanical contribution, which also affect the bridge aeroelastic responses. The nonlinear inherent nature of bluff body aerodynamics combined with the nonlinearities of multimodal aeroelastic analyses result in complex relationships between the full bridge aeroelastic responses and deck shape design variables. This fact impacts the design process as it may lead to the development of complex feasible design regions in the chosen design domain, including disjoint feasible regions that may cause local minima. Given the limitations of metaheuristic optimization methods to deal with optimization problems with large sets of design variables, as required in holistic bridge design problems, gradient-based optimization algorithms can be recast to address global optimization problems. In this study, we propose the use of tunneling optimization methods to address this challenge.