Here's a radical thought for a Wednesday: sometimes the best thing a city can do is maintain what it already has.

Golden Gate Park — all 1,017 acres of it — remains one of the most stunning urban parks in the world. On any given day, you'll find joggers weaving through the trails, families picnicking near Stow Lake, bison doing their stoic bison thing, and tourists realizing that San Francisco actually does have green space that isn't a median strip on Dolores Street.

It's worth pausing to appreciate what we have here. Built on sand dunes that people in the 1870s thought were basically worthless, the park is a testament to long-term vision and smart investment. No gimmicks. No $1.7 billion price tag for a single transit station. Just trees, paths, gardens, and open space that have served millions of San Franciscans for over 150 years.

And here's the fiscal conservative case for parks: they're incredibly cheap per unit of human happiness. Compare the cost of maintaining Golden Gate Park to, say, the budget of any single city department that you've never heard of but somehow employs 200 people. The park wins on ROI every single time.

The challenge, as always, is stewardship. We've seen what happens when the city lets infrastructure slide — crumbling roads, broken escalators at BART, public restrooms that qualify as biohazards. Golden Gate Park deserves better than deferred maintenance and budget raids. It deserves the kind of attention that keeps it the jewel it is, not the kind that slaps a new program on top of it and calls it progress.

So next time you're feeling crushed by the cost of living, the housing crisis, or the general chaos of San Francisco governance, take a walk through the park. It's free. It's beautiful. And it's proof that when the city commits to something simple and does it well, the results speak for themselves.

More of this, please. Less of everything else.