Over the past, oh, five years or so, Toronto has carried out an exhaustive (and exhausting) debate about building transit. Much of that discussion, carried out for high stakes and in high profile at City Hall during the long run of the Ford Bros. Travelling Circus, has actually been very detailed and often highly technical, especially when getting into the nuances of proposed LRT routes and subway routes, especially in Scarborough.

The drawn out discussion was frequently frustrating but at least, one might have thought, it dispelled ignorance — a reason for celebration, since public knowledge is a rare and valuable thing in public policy debates. Even if Ford kept chanting “SUBWAYS! SUBWAYS! SUBWAYS!” the whole time, one would reassure oneself, at least any remotely interested observer would by now be able to grasp the essentials of what these debates are about. Right?

Nope.

Here comes Margaret Kohn, no less a luminary than the acting director for the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus, to demonstrate the unrelenting Fordian transit illiteracy that persists in this city when it comes to the subject of Scarborough. Writing Dec. 1 on the Opinion page of the Star, she scoffed at the contempt of the “downtown cognoscenti” for the three-stop Bloor-Danforth extension, summing it up as a matter of greedhead urban robber barons hoarding an ever greater share of civic spoils for themselves at the expense of the inner-suburban poor — especially in their lust for new subway lines like personal trophies, in the form of the downtown relief line (a subway line whose primary purpose, if it were ever built, would be to provide more space on trains and more routes for suburban riders to travel into downtown).

Eventually she slows the parade of insults long enough to make what she seems to think is a novel argument: that Scarborough is home to many of the city’s poorest and most disadvantaged residents, and has really terrible transit. Invoking the philosopher John Rawls’ famous “veil of ignorance” test, she asks if most people wouldn’t prefer the subway option if they thought there might be a good chance they’d have to live in Scarborough.

Now it must be noted that her core observation — “that a major investment in public transit in the periphery is a matter of justice” — is not a new contribution to this debate. It is in fact pretty much the agreed premise of all parties on which the debate is based.

What LRT network advocates — those who oppose the subway extension — have argued all along is that pouring billions of dollars into a limited extension of the existing Bloor-Danforth line to Scarborough Town Centre robs Scarborough residents of fair access to transit. Because of the immense cost of tunnelling for little benefit over the alternative, the subway means we tie up our transit resources for a generation to build three new stops that will lose money serving a relatively limited ridership. The LRT alternatives are not only far cheaper to build and operate, but they would serve far more riders, bringing rapid transit closer to more neighbourhoods in Scarborough.

“Which particular transit option is the best solution for Scarborough is debatable,” Kohn concedes midway through her piece, and thank God for that, even if the mayor insists the debate is over. I think, in fact, the debate is pretty one-sided on the merits.

Almost one year ago, I wrote that if you wanted to spend $3 billion on good transit in Scarborough — and we do! That’s what we’re spending! — you could build a 30-stop LRT network: “the functionally subway-like seven-stop LRT” — to replace the Scarborough RT — “but extended several more stops (as originally envisioned) into Malvern, and extend the planned Sheppard East LRT line out to the zoo, and build the once-proposed 20-stop Scarborough-Malvern LRT along Eglinton and Kingston Rd., past the University of Toronto Scarborough and up into Malvern.” And likely that whole network could be finished faster than the subway extension, to boot.

Put me behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance and I still choose the LRT network every single time, because it is just way better for getting around.

It isn’t just the “downtown cognoscenti” who are with me against the Scarborough subway option. In a poll Forum Research undertook based on that column I wrote, Torontonians preferred the LRT network by a two-to-one margin, including a majority of those in Scarborough.

City council and the mayor, and apparently Professor Kohn — you could call them the “institutional cognoscenti” — disagree, patronizingly insisting that some people “deserve” subways, no matter what they might tell pollsters. Thus, in the name of “fairness” — actually a strange, snobbish insistence on underground subways or nothing — they are sentencing further generations of Scarborough residents to inferior transit. I’m not sure how the ethics of that shake out. I’m no professor. But it sure doesn’t look like justice to me.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire