A few miles off the Delaware coast lies Red Bird Reef, teeming with fish. An April 6 story in The New York Times describes how it got its name — from New York City’s Redbird subway cars.

Delaware has dumped almost 700 of Gotham’s subway cars at the spot since it started the program back in 2001, when the Empire State was happy to get rid of the old cars, before New York officials recognized their value to anglers. A result, said The Times: “a 400-fold increase in the amount of marine food per square foot in the last seven years.” Tautog, sea bass, flounder, tuna, mackerel and other species have flocked to the area. The cars seem near-perfect in attracting and sheltering fish, turning once barren areas into fish farms.

In turn, fishermen are crowding the reef, reaching such numbers that commercial and recreational anglers often get their lines tangled up. Let’s hope that things don’t get violent between these two often bitterly opposed groups.

So successful has been the project that other states besides Delaware and New York, particularly New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, have been clamoring for the cars. New York State may in fact keep all of them once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers updates the Empire State’s reef permit this summer. Presumably, New York will then start creating many reefs with its dead subway cars, of which it obviously has a more reliable supply than any other state. Officials would probably dump them mostly south of Long Island rather than in crowded, yachtsmen-infested Long Island Sound.

The lesson here for New Englanders should be obvious. Putting such things as used-up cars, ships — or wind-turbine supports — under coastal waters improves fishing, assuming that there are no toxic materials. (There is a little asbestos in the subway cars –– but it poses no danger to anything after the cars are dumped in the ocean.) The only big problem is policing the area so that greedy fishermen don’t get into fights over tangled lines.

The reefs are yet another benefit of mass transit, though we suppose burials at sea of old SUVs wouldn’t be a bad idea either, symbolically and practically.