Magnificent elongation of bridge span length, especially of recently constructed cable stayed bridges and suspension bridges, can be achieved by technological as well as new material development of orthotropic steel deck systems. One such effort is to install curved bulkhead plates inside longitudinal u-ribs, which was analytically and experimentally demonstrated to reduce significant amount of concentrated stresses without sacrificing self-weight of the whole structure. In this paper, the optimal shape of more effective bulkhead plates is characterized by computational analysis. And it is verified from fatigue tests of a 3-dimensional full-scale structure that the fatigue performance can be significantly improved by installing the optimal bulkhead plates and by fabricating the structure out of recently developed high performance steel for bridges.