It might not have 24/7 subway (i think it's 24h on the weekend and 20h during the week), but I've been living in Berlin for 2 years and have yet to chance upon the situation where I didn't have transit available to get back home (neither me not my wife have a driver's license).
Having good transit is really really important. But it doesn't have to be 24/7 for the vast majority of people. In the maybe once per year that I need to go somewhere in 3am on a weekday I can take the night bus or even a taxi.
Yeah, those are good times. SF sucks transit-wise because Caltrain (SF to South Bay) stops at midnight. BART stops around the same time too. Heck, in NYC many events don't even start until 10 pm.
Every evening transit trip to SF (if you live in the south bay) results in end-of-day stress of trying to make the last train home if you don't have overnight accommodations. Not to mention the full South Bay route takes 90 minutes (to go 40 miles!), so you leave at midnight SF and arrive at 1:30 am San Jose.
Yeah everything stopping at midnight even on the weekends would suck. I guess because of the way you wrote it I thought the literal 24h even on weekdays was your point which seemed pretty odd.
I've lived n Vienna and Berlin and in both the subways go till around 1am on weekdays and 24h on weekends, iirc it's about that way in Prague too. I thought this was the type of situation you were comparing it to.
Before they started running the subways all night on weekends in Vienna (which I think only started maybe 5 years ago) I would often have to take the night busses on weekend evenings, which would suck cause they only went every half an hour.
Having good transit is really really important. But it doesn't have to be 24/7 for the vast majority of people. In the maybe once per year that I need to go somewhere in 3am on a weekday I can take the night bus or even a taxi.