Recent earthquakes have demonstrated that the tunnels, which were once considered to be highly resistant to earthquakes, are susceptible to substantial damage under severe seismic loading. Among various modes of deformation under an earthquake loading, the response of the tunnel in the transverse direction is known to be the critical mode. This paper investigates the seismic response of the tunnel in the transverse direction using the method of seismic displacement, which is a type of pseudo-static analysis. Firstly, the methods of calculating the ground deformation are compared. It is shown that the single and double cosine may not provide an accurate estimation of the ground deformation, and that a one-dimensional site response analysis needs to be performed for a more reliable evaluation. Secondly, the tunnel responses are calculated using the simplified, analytical, and numerical solutions. It is demonstrated that the simplified method provides poor estimates of the tunnel response ground deformation. The analytical solution is shown to be effective in modeling circular tunnels in uniform ground, but has serious limitation in modeling tunnel response in non-uniform ground. Numerical analyses are shown to be applicable to all cases, and give the most accurate estimates of the tunnel response. It is also demonstrated that the linear solutions can be so conservative that the soil nonlinearity needs to be accounted for more accurate evaluation of the tunnel response.