San Francisco’s Train System Still Uses Floppy Disks—and Will for Years

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Company, which runs town’s Muni Metro gentle rail, claims to be the primary US company to undertake floppy disks. However at present, the SFMTA is raring to desert its reliance on 5¼-inch floppy disks—simply give it about six years and some hundred million {dollars} extra.

Members of the SFMTA lately spoke with the ABC7 Bay Area News and detailed the company’s use of three 5¼-inch floppy disks each morning. The floppies have been a part of Muni Metro’s Automated Practice Management System (ATCS) since its set up in a Market Road subway cease in 1998. The ATCS has a number of parts, “together with computer systems onboard the trains which are tied into propulsion and brake techniques, central and native servers, and communications infrastructure, like loop cable sign wires,” Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, instructed Ars Technica.

The floppy disks are for loading the software program working the central servers, Roccaforte mentioned:

When a prepare enters the subway, its onboard pc connects to the prepare management system to run the prepare in computerized mode, the place the trains drive themselves whereas the operators supervise. After they exit the subway, they disconnect from the ATCS and return to handbook operation on the road.

Roccaforte mentioned preliminary planning for an overhaul of the ATCS, together with transferring off floppy disks, began in 2018 and was anticipated to take a decade from preliminary planning to completion. Due to an 18-month-long Covid-19-related hiatus, completion is anticipated in 2029 to 2030. SFMTA expects to decide on a contractor by early 2025 and can launch an in depth venture timeline then.

“In the end, our objective is to have a single prepare management system for the whole rail system,” Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA’s director of transportation, instructed ABC7.

Floppy Flaws

“If it ain’t broke do not repair it,” some say. However whereas the floppy-disk-reliant prepare management system is presently working, there are challenges to counting on the dated know-how, which SFMTA has highlighted for years.

The transportation physique says the prepare management system was constructed to final for simply 20 to 25 years, that means it surpassed its anticipated lifetime in 2023. In 2020, the Muni Reliability Working Group, mentioned to be composed of native and nationwide transit specialists, recommended changing the transit management system inside 5 to seven years.

When requested how “dire” it’s to improve off of floppy disks, Tumlin instructed ABC7 that it is all about danger.

“The system is presently working simply effective, however we all know that with every growing yr, danger of knowledge degradation on the floppy disks will increase and that sooner or later there will likely be a catastrophic failure,” Tumlin instructed ABC7.

Beforehand, the transportation company claimed that the ATCS had turn into tougher and costlier to take care of over time. It has additionally mentioned the challenges it has to find employees who know learn how to use the dated system.

“We’ve got to take care of programmers who’re specialists within the programming languages of the ’90s with the intention to maintain working our present system, so we’ve got a technical debt that stretches again many a long time,” Tumlin told San Francisco’s KQED in February 2023.