East New York will see the addition of new real estate in the next few years, and the more people move into an area, the more mass transit it needs. An urban planning Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University has an idea to help the area, and he says it would actually be fairly easy. Jonathan English’s idea is to extend the 3 train past its current terminus at New Lots Avenue to a new terminus at Linden Boulevard, as he published in Urban Omnibus.

How would this be easy? Well, the tracks already go half a mile past the New Lots Avenue station to the Livonia maintenance yard, so it would just be a matter of converting some of those tracks into a surface station. There is precedent, English says, at the other end of the 3 train. Development led to the creation of the Harlem-148 Street station at the Lenox Avenue Yard.

What about the trains currently using the Livonia yard? There is supposedly room for those that would be displaced elsewhere on the subway’s A division (not to be confused with the A train).

How much would this cost? The Metro-North Railroad station at Yankee Stadium cost less than $100 million in 2009, in contrast to the $2.4 billion extension of the 7 train to Hudson Yards.

It’s projected that having this extension of the 3 train would shave 10 minutes off of some of the longest commutes in the city. Another proposal would go even further, extending the line all the way to Flatlands Avenue. That would, however, require buildings to be demolished.

• An Easy Way to Give East New York a New Subway Stop [Urban Omnibus]