Two Metro stations will be renamed, following a vote of the Metro Board of Directors.

In Fairfax County, Tysons Corner station will become simply “Tysons.” And in Prince George’s County, Prince George’s Plaza station will become “Hyattsville Crossing.” The Metro map will change when the second phase of the Silver Line opens, which is currently scheduled for July.

The changes were driven by requests from the two jurisdictions, who will each commit the $332,000 needed to make the necessary edits to signage. Both counties are acting “in response to efforts to rebrand the areas around the Metrorail Stations to encourage transit-oriented development,” according to Metro Board documents.

The Board voted to approve the changes, despite some evidence that the public sort of likes the old ones. Metro collected more than 5,500 survey responses about the proposed changes, and most riders slightly preferred the current station names to the possible new ones. People liked “Tysons Corner” over “Tysons” 67% to 36%, and they liked “Prince George’s Plaza” over “Hyattsville Crossing” 51% to 33%.

Some riders did not mince words when suggesting the new names could be confusing.

“This new name leaves much to be desired,” one rider wrote of the “Hyattsville Crossing” idea. “As somebody who has accidentally taken the metro to East Falls Church when I actually needed to go to West Falls Church, I think that WMATA should avoid duplicating station names as much as possible.”

In recommending the changes anyway, Metro staff suggested that people don’t like change right now especially because of the pandemic.

“History with Metrorail Station naming informs us that our riders and the communities we serve develop attachments to rail station landmarks and resist change,” Board documents read. “According to a Harvard Business Review last week, this may be especially true in the turbulence of 2020 when we are experiencing 3D change – dramatic change on many fronts – rather than linear, incremental change punctuated by occasional and larger disruptors.”

The current station names are markers of previous stages of development in a rapidly gentrifying region. Prince George’s Plaza station was originally named after a nearby shopping mall in 2004. But that mall is now called the Mall at Prince George’s, and the county has been eyeing changing the Metro station name for a decade. The “Hyattsville Crossing” alternative came out of community discussions in 2017.

In Fairfax, elected officials and the Tysons Partnership have been trying to get rid of the “Corner” associated with the place name for a decade. They managed to make the edit in the eyes of the U.S. Postal Service in 2011 and the U.S. Census Bureau in 2015 — and now they want to make the Metro station name match.

Metro Board vice chair Stephanie Gidigbi, who represents the District, voted in favor of the renaming proposals in committee but abstained in the final vote. She noted that the changes are part of a larger story, particularly in Hyattsville, about “the impact of displacement and gentrification in our region” and the role transit-oriented development as an economic driver has played.

“I think naming is one of those challenges when you start to talk about the cultural displacement and the natural tendency for us to know what we’ve always known,” she said.

Two more station names — West Falls Church and the future station at Potomac Yard — are also the subjects of a community engagement process which concludes on Friday.

Currently, West Falls Church station signage references ‘UVA,’ a relic of when the University of Virginia had a location nearby. That’s no longer the case, and the Fairfax Board of Supervisors wants to take the reference off of station signage.

The Potomac Yard station is being built between National Airport and Braddock Road stations, and is slated to open in 2022. Metro wants to formalize the ‘Potomac Yard’ name, which has been a working title for the new construction for a while. The City of Alexandria passed a resolution requesting to add ‘VT’ to the name in recognition of Virginia Tech’s new campus nearby.