Template talk:Valley Metro

Station names
What's with the official, incredibly verbose names? Does any other system in the world have such wordy station names?

I propose the following names, following the pattern of other cities where stations refer to landmarks: Wlindley (talk) 17:19, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * The actual station names in most cases reflect the intersecting street first and then the operating street name. I have put discussion in all stations regarding this.  We should keep encyclopedic content to the actual station names that are shown in official publication and in informal convention.  I am from Phoenix, I do not agree with using the street names, but that was the decision of METRO Light Rail and encyclopedic references must refer to it correctly.  --Recnet (talk) 05:23, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

METRO's printed maps actually use station numbers, which seems sure to lead to mass confusion when stations are added (will they be numbered like Japanese houses, in order of construction?) Worse, merchants and schools are now advertising, "Ride the train to station 13" -- probably because the alternative would be, "Ride the train to Washington Street and Central Avenue and Jefferson Street and First Avenue station" -- arrgh. Anyway, I added METRO's station numbers, just like METRO shows it on their maps, as part of the official name; and METRO's printed matter includes a space around the slashes, reproduced here. Please note that "Washington/Central Avenue and Jefferson/1st Avenue Station" steals the world record, being longer even than what was formerly the world's longest railway station name at Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.

Furthermore, the current names here should be removed as being insufficiently shorter and perhaps even less helpful than METRO's; currently the Wiki names are "Central Avenue and..." repeatedly, for example, whereas putting the cross-street first (instead of the street that the trolley follows for miles) would both be useful and consistent with METRO's verbose names. I propose that we exclusively use METRO's official sesquipedalian names, which are now correctly shown below, followed by the short, landmark-based names shown in the "Proposed" column. For example, we should have "Washington / Central Avenue and Jefferson / 1st Avenue (City Hall)". We are trying here to be encyclopedic (by documenting the facts, frustrating as they may be) and helpful (by making the world simple to understand). Let us keep things as simple as possible. Wlindley (talk) 15:51, 1 June 2011 (UTC)