If anyone should be especially thankful this Thanksgiving, it should be Senator Paul Sarbanes. In one of his last acts as County Executive, Doug Duncan asked the Metro board to name the new Silver Spring Transit Center after our outgoing Senator and an outspoken transit advocate. The $75 million Senator Paul S. Sarbanes Silver Spring Transit Center (if the re-naming of BWI is any indicator to how it will be named) will start construction this summer.Will they re-name the Silver Spring Metro station itself after this is built? Probably not. Metro does not traditionally change station names once they're open - even when Prince George's Plaza became the Mall at Prince George's, the Metro station retained the PG Plaza moniker. They did, though, change the name of Mt. Vernon Square/7th St-Convention Center to reflect the convention center's move from Chinatown, but that was more of a logistical issue than the desire to stay up-to-date with place names.
Either way - man, I wish I had a place named for me while I was still alive. Sarbanes will pinch himself every time he takes a train to Silver Spring.
2 comments:
What did Sarbanes ever do for Montgomery County?
I'd like to see WMATA greatly simplify all the metro names. Why for example can't "U Street/ African-American Civil War Memorial/ Cardozo" simply be "U-Street"? We don't need neighborhood descriptions injected into the station names. WMATA clearly isn't giving passengers enough credit here. If someone is headed to the AA Civil War memorial and they learn its at the U Street stop, they'll get off at U Street. Not too difficult.
Other station names that desprately need shortening:
OLD:Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan
NEW:Woodley Park
OLD:New York Ave-Florida Ave-Gallaudet U
NEW:NoMa
OLD: Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter
NEW: Penn Quarter
OLD: Vienna/Fairfax-GMU
NEW: Fairfax
Seriously, can't we invoke an 8 syllable cap or something?
Post a Comment