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

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which runs town’s Muni Metro gentle rail, claims to be the primary US company to undertake floppy disks. But at this time, 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 not too long ago 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 Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) since its set up in a Market Street subway cease in 1998. The ATCS has a number of elements, “including computers onboard the trains that are tied into propulsion and brake systems, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure, like loop cable signal wires,” Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, advised Ars Technica.

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

When a practice enters the subway, its onboard pc connects to the practice management system to run the practice in computerized mode, the place the trains drive themselves whereas the operators supervise. When they exit the subway, they disconnect from the ATCS and return to guide 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. Because of an 18-month-long Covid-19-related hiatus, completion is predicted in 2029 to 2030. SFMTA expects to choose a contractor by early 2025 and can launch an in depth venture timeline then.

“Ultimately, our goal is to have a single train control system for the entire rail system,” Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA’s director of transportation, advised ABC7.

Floppy Flaws

“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” some say. But whereas the floppy-disk-reliant practice management system is presently working, there are challenges to counting on the dated expertise, which SFMTA has highlighted for years.

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

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

“The system is currently working just fine, but we know that with each increasing year, risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure,” Tumlin advised ABC7.

Previously, the transportation company claimed that the ATCS had change into tougher and costlier to take care of over time. It has additionally mentioned the challenges it has to find staff who know the best way to use the dated system.

“We have to maintain programmers who are experts in the programming languages of the ’90s in order to keep running our current system, so we have a technical debt that stretches back many decades,” Tumlin told San Francisco’s KQED in February 2023.