Comment on Pierce and Shoup: Evaluating the Impacts of Performance-Based Parking

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This article refers to:

Getting the Prices Right

This article is referred to by:

Response to Millard-Ball et al.: Parking Prices and Parking Occupancy in San Francisco

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Editor's Note

Notes

1 The data are available on the SFMTA website: http://sfpark.org/resources/meter-rate-adjustment-spreadsheet-april-2013/ (accessed December 19, 2013).

2 Pierce and Shoup (2013) report 5,294 price changes. The slight discrepancy may be caused by dropping certain blocks with incomplete observations. Note that this total only includes rate changes for which elasticities can be computed; it excludes observations where after occupancy data are missing.

3 Pierce and Shoup (2013) do not report exact numbers, but Figure 9 of their article and our replication of their results indicate that more than 35% of elasticities are positive. Our simulations result in only 19% of elasticities being positive. This provides further evidence that other forms of endogeneity, such an increase in demand from a new restaurant leading to subsequent price increases, which would be expected to yield positive elasticities, are biasing Pierce and Shoup's results.

4 A related design that could be used is the matching design discussed by Dehejia and Wahba (2002).

5 For a discussion of the assumptions behind regression discontinuity designs and applications to the transportation and planning contexts, see Washington, Karlaftis, and Mannering (2011) and Deng and Freeman (2011).

6 The data file is available at http://sfpark.org/resources/meter-rate-adjustment-spreadsheet-november-2013/ (accessed December 19, 2013).

7 A similar view has been expressed by the manager of SFpark (Bialick, 2011).