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What, Citizens Bank didn't want to buy the naming rights to State Street?

The Boston Business Journal reports only JetBlue put in a bid to rename an MBTA station and that bid was rejected because it was for less than the amount that would make it worth the T's effort to rename a station.

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Comments

Gee, what a shame. It would really provide a benefit to MBTA riders if we could rename the stations every few years with arbitrary names that have nothing to do with their actual locations.

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I assume that "renaming" simply means it would have been renamed State Street/Jet Blue or State Street/Citizens Bank, etc. As was done before. I forget who it was. It would still always be "State Street". I have to wonder though, why does MGH get Charles Street to be named Charles/MGH for free?

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Because the station is the one people take to go to MGH. It's useful information for people taking the T to go to the hospital.

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Same reason Tufts Medical does, and same reason the various universities do - they're destinations that a lot of people will be going to and are neighborhood landmarks.

JetBlue station, on the other hand, would not be located anywhere with any connection to JetBlue. It might be an appropriate name for a station located at JetBlue headquarters though.

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Because when they changed their name from New England Medical Center to Tufts Medical Center a few years back, they had to pay the T to re-do all the signs and system maps.

A couple years before that, the BPL made noise about getting the T to change Copley to Copley/BPL. That, obviously, never went anywhere.

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if we could rename the stations every few years with arbitrary names that have nothing to do with their actual locations

I worked for a while at a place with conference rooms named after ski areas in northern New England. My little brain could never retain which room was where because it never made sense to me.

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Just the conference rooms? Place I worked had the conference rooms named, printers/copiers, every company computer had a some name given to it. Some where place names, some seemed to be last names of notable people from centuries ago...I didn't really understand it.

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I tell people in craigslist housemate ads that the town of Arlington is no where near the Arlington T stop, yet every time some fail to understand. So, I'm all for renaming that station!

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I'd like to change Park Street to Universal Hub.

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If JetBlue was proposing to rename anything else, it would have only confused people (including JetBlue's own customers)

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"In addition, firms could add their names to the Blue Line (a $1.2 million minimum bid), Red Line ($1.6 million) and Green Line ($2 million). JetBlue had applied to sponsor the entire Blue Line."

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Can't believe that'd only be $1.2 million.

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How about the Blue Cross Blue Shield Blue Line?

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What corporate sponsor has a reliability record worse than the MBTA such that naming anything in the MBTA would make them look better?

I'm struggling to think of a private company so bad, but Jet Blue comes close, and State is on the blue line. Fung Wa is another, but no longer operating.

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Comcast? AT&T?

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I like Jet Blue, I haven't got a bad story so far from them.

And for Fung Wah, while shut down, I voiced before and I must voice again now that Fung Wah did not have an accident since 2007, contrary to popular opinion. Of course, the media tend to cite a later date... an accident involving a garbage truck that drove into a parked Fung Wah bus. The government crackdown is technically citing legitimate violations, but the crackdown stemmed from a fatal accident by World Wide Tours (now Go Bus) and advocacy by the American Bus Association. When was the last time have you heard a trade union lobbying the government for greater regulation on "themselves"? And while it was a Chinatown bus, it was not an Asian-American owned/run company. Meanwhile all 28 bus companies shut down has all been Asian-Americans. I must note despite perception, if regulations were enforced to the true spirit, Peter Pan and Greyhound would be cited too. Instead, they opened their new Chinatown line "Yo bus" that just happens to be a week after Fung Wah was gone.

The sole survivor today is Lucky Star. Though Fung Wah is still trying to comeback. They got lucky because they were ordering a whole bunch of new buses when they got shut down. Oh, btw, the cracked bus frames the media kept repeating, it wasn't as dangerous as it sounds like.

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Here's an interesting article that explores the facts behind Lucky Star's supposed violations: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/02/the-government-s-cheap-...

It's an interesting angle: that the Feds were on a mission to issue violations, even if the law didn't back them up. And it was easier for the company to just accept the violations rather than fighting them, to finish the ordeal before they totally ran out of money.

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Meanwhile all 28 bus companies shut down has [sic] all been Asian-Americans.

Probably because most of the bus companies are owned by Asian-Americans, except for GoBus, as you note.

The Feds have put a big dent in the mafia in the NYC/Boston region. It must be because of a conspiracy against Italian-Americans, right?

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I'd like to rename Government Center to "Closed". :)

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We could just close the actual government center...

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Maybe we could hit up State Street Bank to buy the naming rights. It shouldn't cost much to change the signs.

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Yeah, I'm sure it would be money well spent to pay the T to put "State Street" on a bunch of signs.

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Why is the state renaming just T stops, we should sell naming rights to streets, highways, and bridges to make money. If its not confusing to T riders to have multiple names to stations drivers should be fine too.

1. The Ted Williams/Mohegan Sun Tunnel
2. BU/Commonwealth Ave
3. Tremont/Millennium Towers Street
4. Mass/Harvard University Avenue
5. Mass Pike/Liberty Mutual Way
6. Atlantic Converse Avenue
7. Memorial/Althea Health Drive
8. Storrow-United Airlines Drive

This could make 100s of millions if every highway and many of hte main avenues and major streets in the state had corporate names!

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Why not just sell the names to all sorts of things? Imagine taking the Red Bull Line, taking the train over the Google Longfellow Bridge as you pass from the City of Boston sponsored by Verizon to Apple Cambridge, looking out at the McDonalds Charles River... just another day in the Commonwealth of AT&T.

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State Street Station (as State/Citizens Bank) when Jim Kerasiotes first foisted this terrible idea of naming rights for the MBTA on the riders in the early 1990s. Obviously, they weren't too impressed with the results.

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No company in its right mind would want to be associated with an operation that performs as poorly as the T. I must presume that Jet Blue was interested in the Airport or another Blue Line stop - its seems that it is now the only line that is not plagued by delays every single day.

Seriously, can you imagine the T alerts and alerts from other sources? "Red Line delayed due to fire at State Street/DTX station". "Red Line experiencing moderate delays due to medical emergency at Google/Kendall Station".

I'm not a PR guy, but I don't think many PR reps for those companies would want to see juxtapositions like those.

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