An elevated metro system is more preferred type of metro system due to ease of construction and also it makes urban areas more accessible without any construction difficulty. An elevated metro system has two major elements pier and box girder. This paper concentrates only on the design of pier and its performance. Conventionally the pier of a metro bridge is designed using a force based approach. During a seismic loading, the behaviour of a single pier elevated bridge relies mostly on the ductility and the displacement capacit y. It is important to check the ductility of such single piers. Force based methods do not explicitly check the displacement capacity during the design. The codes are now moving towards a performance-based (displacement-based) design approach, which consider the design as per the target performances at the design stage. In this paper, performance of a pier designed by a Direct Displacement Based Design is compared with that of a force-based designed one. The design of a pier is done by both force based seismic design method and direct displacement based seismic design method and perform ance assessment is done based on both the methods.