.EthanElkind, the director of BerkeleyLawCLEE and an author, says branding “can make a marginal difference by getting people more familiar with the project.' “Unless it really turns people off, there’s not really a downside to it.”
In a region struggling to drum up support for new transit projects, the"Downtown Extension” doesn’t quite have the right ring to it.
The joint powers board first heard the rebranding proposal at a meeting last week, but asked staff to come back in October after revising the proposed tagline of “Unlocking Bay Area and state rail connections.” The rebranding plan would also come with a new logo invoking train tracks and a tunnel. In addition to bringing Caltrain into downtown, the project would also be designed to accommodate future high-speed rail trains bound for the Central Valley and Southern California. It would bring Caltrain and high-speed trains within easy walking distance of the Embarcadero BART and Muni station and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the Financial District.
The rebranding effort was based in part on a survey of 400 voters who live close to major transit corridors throughout the Bay Area. The survey found low familiarity with the Downtown Extension, with just 12% of respondents saying they were very familiar with it, and 28% saying they were somewhat familiar with it.
While most transit projects typically have descriptive names, creative branding is not unprecedented, said Jonathan English, a transportation historian at NYU’s Marron Institute. The effort to build a new train tunnel connecting New York City and New Jersey has gone through several naming iterations, reflecting different political conditions. It began as Access to the Region’s Core, or ARC, then it became Trans-Hudson Express, or THE, and now it’s known as Gateway.
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