For example: I was issued a ticket in SF for moving (and I hired professionals to do it). That kind of crap simply doesn't happen in New York, but it happened routinely in SF.

I'd actually argue that the quality of street / park trees is the best way to judge how competently a city has been run over time. When a city has lots of healthy older trees, that means not a single administration has dropped the ball in over 200 years or whatever. If look around NYC there are thousands of mature American elm trees everywhere, but not in any of the surrounding suburbs. Why? Because NYC parks department actually takes care of the trees when they're sick and removes them if they can't be saved, whereas all of the surrounding tri-state towns just let them infect the surrounding trees and then die.

Now maybe the fact that Robert Moses's favorite tree was the sycamore should have been a hint to everyone that some of his other policies may have been suspect, but that's a different issue.