MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).
show/hide this revision's text 1 [made Community Wiki]

The French Railroad metric: if $(X,d)$ is a metric space, and $p \in X$, define $d_R(x,y) = 0$ if $x = y$ and $d_R(x,y) = d(x,p) + d(y,p)$ otherwise. Apparently named so because almost every train in France goes trough Paris.