The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has submitted a list of dull, wordy station names to the Metro board. These names are for the new Silver Line stations that lie within the County, so the Loudoun stations aren’t on the list. Emphasis mine in the quote:
The WMATA policy indicates that station names should involve the following:
- Identify the station location by geographical features or centers of activity;
- Geographical names may be derived from those of cities, communities; neighborhoods, squares, circles, Metro-intersecting streets, etc.;
- Centers of activity may be derived from schools, stadiums, parks, hospitals, airports, depots, shopping centers, galleries, museums, government installations, etc.;
- Names should be distinctive and evoke imagery; and
- Names should be relatively brief and be no longer than 19 characters.
Most of the entries on the Board’s approved list fail to meet the fourth and fifth criteria above:
- Tysons-McLean
- Tysons I&II
- Tysons Central
- Tysons-Spring Hill Road
- Reston-Wiehle Avenue
- Reston Town Center
- Herndon-Reston West
- Herndon-Dulles East
Here are the names I would use. Several of them are the placeholder names that have been on planning maps for years—eminently useful because they told you where the station was located with no hyphenated hoohah.
- Scott’s Run (or Scotts Run, if you want to be postal about it)
- Tysons Center
- Freedom Hill (sorry, there can be only one center)
- Spring Hill Road
- Wiehle Avenue
- Reston Town Center
- Monroe Street
- Sully Road (I’m not so sure about this one, since it seems to lie between Sully and Centerville Roads)
I would also consider “Dulles Gateway” for Route 28, if some property developer hasn’t already snapped up that name.
Or maybe we should go the naming-rights-for-sale route and call the Tysons-McLean station “Tysons-Capital One” and be done with it. Until Capital One goes bust, of course.