San Francisco’s Practice System Nonetheless Makes use of Floppy Disks—and Will for Years

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Company, which runs the town’s Muni Metro mild rail, claims to be the primary US company to undertake floppy disks. However in the present day, 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 just lately spoke with the ABC7 Bay Space Information and detailed the company’s use of three 5¼-inch floppy disks each morning. The floppies have been a part of Muni Metro’s Computerized Practice Management System (ATCS) since its set up in a Market Avenue subway cease in 1998. The ATCS has a number of parts, “together with computer systems onboard the trains which can be tied into propulsion and brake methods, 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 stated:

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

Roccaforte stated 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 predicted in 2029 to 2030. SFMTA expects to decide on a contractor by early 2025 and can launch an in depth mission timeline then.

“In the end, our aim is to have a single practice management system for your entire 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 practice management system is at present working, there are challenges to counting on the dated know-how, 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, stated to be composed of native and nationwide transit specialists, really helpful 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 threat.

“The system is at present working simply tremendous, however we all know that with every growing 12 months, threat of information degradation on the floppy disks will increase and that sooner or later there can be a catastrophic failure,” Tumlin instructed ABC7.

Beforehand, the transportation company claimed that the ATCS had turn out to be more durable and dearer to take care of over time. It has additionally mentioned the challenges it has to find staff who know the way to use the dated system.

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