Metro changing station names effective 9/11

I understand some changing as part of the natural evolution of the places where the stations reside (Largo, for example). But others are just baffling, like White Flint. Unless a station name is truly 'wrong' or has always confused patrons, it seems odd and unnecessary to rename them years and years after they opened.

Those chicken folks sure have some pull

A goal of transit systems is to support (not a regular commuter) passengers who are not overly familiar with the system and who use the system in an irregular fashion. One way to support those passengers is to occasionally rename stations to match the names of the neighborhoods/communities/destinations close to the stations, so that a route map is as much a map of neighborhoods served as it a map of the transit system itself without having to cover the map in neighborhood/community/destination names that make the map itself difficult to use.

I think in this case, though, it's more a situation where WMATA has decided to do away with station names based on nearby shopping center names (possibly because they aren't getting paid by the developers?).