Cleaning up Contour Lines, eliminating unwanted artifacts

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In situations like the one in the attached image (yellow marked area around the bridge) I need to cleanup the generated contours, because the source for the contours was a surface rather than a true terrain model. Unfortunately that happens.

The only way to fix I know about is editing one countour line after the other:
- deleting the distracting points, which results in straight line segments (not nice)
- or to split each contour and to cut out the distracting segments (better)

Both approaches are very tedious and cost much time to do properly given the fact that contour lines in such areas are often very close together.
Is there a nice/better way to do so?

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image attached as jpg