A by the highly amusing @MetroShutsDoors account led me to about the naming of the new stations along the route to Dulles Airport. Included in the article was the following:
The Reston Town Center name has received some criticism from citizens because the station will not actually be at the Reston Town Center, but a several blocks away. However, developers say that the town center may eventually be built out to reach the station, and there are also plans in the works for walkways, paths and other infrastructure that will make the station and the town center feel more connected.
The closest metro station to my house is Vienna-Fairfax/GMU, which is pretty far from George Mason University, from which it takes part of its name. That made me wonder: how far apart are the station and the university, and what other stations named for their locations are far from their namesakes?
I didn’t check all stations – anything with a neighborhood name wasn’t worth checking, because neighborhood boundaries can be blurred and amorphous. Only those named for concrete physical structures or clearly defined campuses were examined.
Many stations are directly connected to, on top of, or adjacent to their namesakes. These are: Medical Center, Van Ness-UDC, Union Station, Foggy Bottom-GWU, National Airport, Crystal City, Pentagon City, Pentagon, U St/African-American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo, Mt Vernon Sq-7th St-Convention Center, and Archives/Navy Memorial (for the Navy Memorial).
Several stations are within a five-minute walk of their namesakes, walking at 2.5mph (slower than the average human, who walks at 3mph). These are: Archives/Navy Memorial (for the Archives), Brookland-CUA, Grosvenor-Strathmore, Stadium-Armory (for the Armory), Virginia Square-GMU (GMU Arlington Campus), Prince Georges Plaza, and Largo Town Center. Note that Waterfront-SEU was about a five-minute walk from Southeastern University, before the school closed.
The following stations are within a 10 minute walk, at 2.5mph: West Falls Church-VT/UVA (Virginia Tech/Univ of VA Northern Virginia campus), Arlington Cemetery, Stadium-Armory (for the Stadium), Shaw-Howard University, Navy Yard, Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan. Also, note that the U Street station is actually slightly closer to Howard University than the station actually named for Howard University; the stations opened on the very same day (May 11, 1991).
After this we get a little further away. Of the remaining stations I looked at, only New York Ave-Florida Ave-Gallaudet University is within half a mile of its namesake university. The closest grounds of U of MD are about 0.56mi from the College Park-University of Maryland station, but the university campus itself extends quite a bit beyond that point. Although American University’s Tenley Campus is adjacent to the metro station, the university proper is 0.75mi away – almost a 20-minute walk at 2.5mph.
And then we come to the stations whose namesakes you really wouldn’t want to walk to, of which there are two: Ballston-MU, which is 1.7 miles from Marymount University. The walk there is through medium-density commercial and residential neighborhoods, not a bad walk, but at 40 minutes it’s not something you’d want to try when you’re running late for class. The other one that’s too far to walk to is my home station, Vienna-Fairfax/GMU. It’s 3.57 miles from George Mason University. They are connected by many bus routes, and the buses run frequently, but it’s definitely not walking distance.
Of course, this issue isn’t about transportation density – it’s impractical for many reasons to put a stop closer to GMU, and nobody expects that – it’s about naming stations. Which brings us back to Reston. How far is too far for a stop before you can’t name it after a place anymore? Well, the middle of the Dulles Toll Road, at Reston Parkway, is about 0.44 miles from Reston Town Center. As you can see from the above information, this is pretty standard for metro stations. Given that people who will be visiting the station – that is, excluding those who are commuting from there – will likely be going there to visit Reston Town Center and perhaps Plaza America, it seems perfectly reasonable to name the stop Reston Town Center.