It looked as though a particularly imaginative planner had taken magic markers and scrawled loops on a map of San Francisco. But as soon as the proposal for 24 miles of new underground subway lines emerged on social media, it caught fire instantly.

Manny Yekutiel, a prominent cafe owner in a fiercely competitive race for supervisor, had unveiled what was either a fever dream for commuters and transit nerds, or a costly and monumentally complicated debacle that would surely never see the light of day. Should the project come to fruition, trains would run through Golden Gate Park, the Richmond, the Castro, the Sunset, the Bayview and along the waterfront.

Costs could rise to an eye-popping $27.5 billion. Yekutiel considers that a worthwhile expense.

“A citywide subway system is a generational investment in what San Francisco can become,” he said in a statement announcing the plan. “I’m running to be a builder: to build the housing we need, build a transportation system worthy of a great city, and build a better San Francisco for the next generation.”

Having staked out his brand, Yekutiel is trying to advance an agenda for District 8 — an area that spreads through the Castro, Glen Park and Cole Valley — where he is running as a moderate to succeed Rafael Mandelman.

He has anchored his campaign on ambitious policy proposals, like a pledge to deliver 10,000 new homes in eight years, a lofty goal that will almost certainly meet pushback. At one site alone, the Safeway grocery store at Market and Church streets, Yekutiel hopes to add 2,000 units.

But it’s the subway idea that captivated the public this week, eliciting delight from transit advocates and intense skepticism from people who accuse Yekutiel in social media posts of magical thinking without regard for the realities of San Francisco’s budget constraints. His subway would be funded from a mix of federal and state grants, private capital and local revenue possibly netted from congestion pricing. If San Francisco could build the system at the same cost as other major cities across the world, his proposal would cost only about $8.4 billion, according to Yekutiel’s platform.

Many see this as an enormous lift at a moment when transit agencies face galling deficits and are appealing to voters to tax bailouts in November. Congestion pricing has previously gotten a chilly reception in San Francisco.

To be fair, San Francisco leaders have long kicked around the idea of a more expansive subway system. Earlier this year Supervisor Danny Sauter tried to revive a $1.4 billion extension of the Central Subway, from its current terminus in Chinatown up through North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf. Meanwhile, staff at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority have studied the possibility of a $20 billion to $30 billion railway along Geary Boulevard and down 19th Avenue, corridors that are already served by rapid Muni buses.

Yekutiel’s idea merges and enhances these earlier proposals to produce a transit system with four lines, with two north-south routes from the Marina to Caltrain’s Bayshore Station, another from the Central Richmond to Daly City BART, and an east-west link from Union Square to the Outer Richmond.

Critics have sown doubt or called the citywide plan a political stunt. Many point out the unlikelihood that President Donald Trump and a GOP-led Congress would shower money on a new train in one of the nation’s bluest cities, especially given the administration’s animus toward high-speed rail.

Responding to a question about how the city should expand public transit during a candidate forum Wednesday evening, Yekutiel pushed back against the notion that the subway plan is “cockamamie and crazy.” Many other major cities have underground subway systems and San Franciscans “deserve the same,” Yekutiel said.

“Can it be done overnight? No, but we should be asking for what we want.”

David Pezzi, a Diamond Heights resident who attended the forum on Wednesday, has not yet decided which candidate he will vote for in November. He is a public transit enthusiast and said he liked that Yekutiel was dreaming big about expanding rail options in the city, even though he said he was doubtful that he’d see the subway lines completed in his lifetime.

“One day it will happen,” Pezzi said. “He put it out here and it’s in the public thought now.”

Yekutiel’s three opponents all spelled out their own visions for public transit at the forum. Two of them, Darshini Patel and Gary McCoy, would target the more immediate work of patching Muni’s deficit while keeping the buses and trains running on time.

“I do dream of a subway here and I hope to ride one one day in my 70s,” quipped Patel, who is 38. “But I also want to make sure that we can have transit that is accessible and available for us tomorrow.”

Supervisors should focus on the “thing that’s in front of us,” McCoy said, like preventing cuts to bus routes and making service more reliable, as well as thinking big-picture about the future of the city.

McCoy’s approach has resonated with Howard Fallon, a Noe Valley resident and a retired policy analyst for the president of the University of California. He was skeptical that Yekutiel could get a subway line to Ocean Beach built.

“Manny’s really kind of pie-in-the-sky. Gary says, ‘I work on the issues in front of me today,’” said Fallon, who has volunteered with McCoy’s campaign.

Yekutiel served for two years on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors and on Wednesday touted the agency’s work during the pandemic building dedicated bike and bus lanes and making more than a dozen slow streets permanent. He also said that as supervisor he would work to connect bike lanes and improve pedestrian safety on 17th street.

Tom Radulovich, senior policy lead at the nonprofit Livable City, has his own doubts about the viability of a big-swing megaproject like the subway proposal. But he praised Yekutiel for starting an important public conversation.

“San Francisco does need a rapid transit master plan for its rail system,” Radulovich said, noting that Yekutiel’s map synthesizes a lot of ideas that have been bandied about before and seem to make sense. Planners have long talked of bringing the Central Subway farther north, given that a tunnel already runs through Washington Square Park in North Beach. Muni at one point considered burrowing the M-line from West Portal to Parkmerced. Full build-outs would make existing infrastructure more productive.

All the same, Radulovich questioned whether a new $27.5 billion subway system is necessary if San Francisco could accomplish the same goal in a less glamorous way — by adding more Caltrain stations and upgrading Muni light rail lines. Caltrain could easily become a “metro” on the east side if it stopped in Bayview and at 16th Street, Radulovich said. And the T-Third train could run more efficiently if it had dedicated lanes for the whole route.

“Sometimes a way of not solving transportation problems is to instead invent this far-off solution,” Radulovich said. “We don’t have the political courage to say the ( Muni Metro) shouldn’t be stuck in traffic, because we don’t want to offend a motorist or take away parking. So we propose a subway.”

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