MBTA plan way off track

Tuesday morning, a little before noon, I was standing on the sidewalk outside Tufts-New England Medical Center with a simple thought coursing through my tiny mind.

I was watching one bus after another sigh to a stop. I was watching ambulances, lights blazing, pull into a nearby bay. Pedestrians on crutches and in wheelchairs and some in hospital scrubs were moving willy-nilly across the shadowy stretch of Washington Street that runs between Tufts-NEMC and its famed Floating Hospital for Children. Traffic jerked along with the rhythm of a fraternity brother at a karaoke contest.

And I kept thinking this: The whole world, or at least the part of it known as the MBTA, has gone stark, raving mad.

I'll explain. The geniuses running the MBTA have decided that of all the places in this big, beautiful city where they could build an entrance to a new Silver Line tunnel, the very best place they could find is this: along a narrow, congested street directly outside the front doors of one of the busiest emergency rooms in town. Good going. For sheer, unadulterated, government-funded lunacy, it doesn't get much better than this.

The T won't reach an official decision until autumn, but three of the four plans under consideration have the Silver Line portal outside Tufts-New England Medical Center. And the fourth proposal, a spot a few blocks away near the corner of Columbus Avenue and Berkeley Street, has met with the wrath of the ever-hysterical Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, which goes to court as often as normal people go to the grocery store.

T officials whispered to me this week that the Washington Street site was desirable for a variety of reasons, most especially because the city already owned the land on which the portal would be built and because the site provided ''geometrically" the most direct connection for the buses to the as-yet-built tunnel. Of course, with this kind of thinking, Gillette Stadium should have been built on Boston Common, given that it's city owned and there's a parking garage right downstairs.

But for what the T doesn't take into account, let's go to Ellen Zane, the chief executive of Tufts-NEMC. Zane raised the fact that eye surgeries involving sophisticated lasers will occur just above the site in which heavy equipment will pound through earth to build the tunnel entrance, in a process that will take several years. She said temperamental gamma knives are used for brain surgery just a few yards away, and the MRI center is there, as well.

''You wouldn't want your mother getting cataract surgery with this going on outside," she said.

Forget your mother and her cataracts. How would it feel to be sprawled on a surgical table about to have a brain operation with a state-of-the-art laser knife, and the last thing you sense before going under is the building shaking from the bulldozers outside.

As Zane added, ''All this defies any kind of logic, as far as we're concerned."

And that doesn't even take into account what will happen once the portal is built, which is some 50 buses an hour coming down Washington Street, crossing lanes, backing one another up, blocking bays as frantic ambulance drivers transporting ailing patients try to get in.

Before I go on, I'll confess some bias. My oldest sister has worked for years in the pediatric intensive care unit of the Floating, and a better nurse in a better hospital I can't possibly imagine. She and many others like her may have the most important jobs in town.

T officials, though, say everything's fine, that they have created models and done vibration tests and that traffic on Washington Street won't be any worse, if that's where they decide to put the portal. Thank you, MBTA. And the Big Dig wasn't supposed to leak and was scheduled to be finished about 10 years ago.

The days of the Boston citizenry believing the government about the cost, intrusion, and quality of public works projects is long over. It would be nice if government insanity would be over with it.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.