It is well known that in typical displacement-based curved beam elements, the stiffness matrix is overestimated and as a result displacement predictions show gross error for the thin beam case. In this paper, a stain based curved beam element with 2 nodes is formulated based on shallow beam geometry. At the element level, the curvature and membrane strain fields are approximated independently and the displacement fields are obtained by integrating the strain fields. Three test problems are given to demonstrate the numerical performance of the element. Analysis results obtained reveal that the element is free for locking and very effectively applicable to deeply as well as shallowly curved beams.