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I've lived in New York.

So have I.

Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that?

It would be a significant improvement. NYC is far from perfect, but it has semi-affordable rents (outside of Manhattan), semi-functional transit, and much less excrement.

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Nearly all of the subway lines were built many decades ago when construction costs were much cheaper. It’s basically impossible for San Francisco to ever build such a comprehensive system at this point. Consider that they just spent $2 billion on a train station that doesn’t have any train tracks serving it and was only open for six weeks before it was closed because it was found to be structurally unsound. If they do ever build the train tracks (estimated to take ten years and cost $6 billion), they didn’t build enough platforms for the number of trains they want to run.

> Consider that they just spent $2 billion on a train station

This can't be anything other than corruption or incompetence. There is absolutely no way it can possibly cost that much. The new One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower) cost about $3.8 billion, so almost twice that, but that should give you a scale... and this was done in a city not known for cheap construction costs.

SF's development and planning culture is just epically bad.

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