The urban tunnel construction will cause ground movement and the deformation or even damage of the nearby pipelines. It's very common in practice that the structural stiffness is ignored in the settlement prediction and damage assessment because of the complexity of tunnel soil pipeline interaction. Based on the study of pipeline settlement profiles measured from several tunnelling projects, an observation is put forward that the settlement profiles of the pipeline can be fit very well by the Gaussian equation in case of using a larger trough width parameter K influenced by the stiffness of the pipeline. Thus an empirical relationship between the parameter K and the stiffness of the pipeline was proposed which can be used to predict the trough parameter according to the stiffness, and a ‘Modified Stiffness Method' was proposed.