In a region struggling to drum up support for new transit projects, the “Downtown Extension” doesn’t quite have the right ring to it.
That’s the conclusion of the agency in charge of the project to extend the Caltrain tracks 1.3 miles underground from the existing terminus at Fourth and King to a new station in the basement of the Salesforce Transit Center downtown. Instead, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority wants to rebrand the Downtown Extension as “the Portal,” in an effort to generate excitement and increase awareness about the project.
The rebranding effort comes with San Francisco’s latest transportation mega-project, the Central Subway, slated to open in a matter of weeks. The Downtown Extension, or the Portal, if it is ultimately renamed, is the next big subway project on the docket in The City.
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.
“I’m no fan of ‘Downtown Extension,’ let alone DTX … so this is certainly better, but it’s not really sitting with me,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, a TJPA Board member and head of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
Alicia John-Baptiste, president of the urban planning think tank SPUR, and a TJPA board member, said the name “strikes me as somewhat masculine and aggressive. It didn’t feel very inviting to me.”
Several other board members said the name and tagline were “almost there.”
“The most important purpose of this new name has to be to regionalize the name so that everyone in the nine county Bay Area sees that they benefit from this very expensive project that happens to be just in the city and county of San Francisco,” Tumlin said. As a tagline, he suggested, “Uniting the Bay, Connecting California.”
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 project, estimated to cost between $4.4 billion and $5 billion, is fully environmentally cleared and is aiming to enter a major federal grant program early next year. It’s projected to be complete by the early 2030s.
The Downtown Extension could also play a significant role in a plan to build a new train tunnel under the bay between San Francisco and Oakland that could serve BART and conventional rail trains like Caltrain and Capitol Corridor. That project, known as Link21, is still in the early planning stages.
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.
At the TJPA Board meeting last week, board members noted that increasing the visibility of the project will be important as the agency turns to voters to close anticipated funding gaps. The reauthorization of San Francisco’s transportation sales tax, which will appear as Proposition L on the November ballot, is one such initiative.
However, branding probably won’t have a very significant impact on the project’s political prospects, said Ethan Elkind, director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment and the author of “Railtown,” a history of Los Angeles’ transit system. Branding “can make a marginal difference by getting people more familiar with the project, more excited about it, more invested in it,” he said. “Unless it really turns people off, there’s not really a downside to it.”
While most transit projects typically have descriptive names, creative branding is not unprecedented, said Jonathan English, a transportation historian at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. 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.
For any given project, “the name, generally speaking, is less important than the public understanding what it means,” English said. “If a member of the public sees a project, and sees that this is going to benefit me in some way, or, some people are more altruistic about it, will benefit the city, then they will support it.”
The TJPA is no stranger to rebranding exercises. Back in 2018, the agency sold the naming rights of the Transit Center and its rooftop park to Salesforce in a deal that generated $110 million in revenue to the agency.
