On October 15, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) entered into a $212 million contract with Hitachi Rail to get its Muni Metro light rail control system off of floppy disks and an additional $488 million (for a total of $700 million) will go to other key maintenance tasks like replacing the slow, fragile, aged loop cables [h/t Ars Technica].
This isn’t the only example in recent memory of a government finally doing away with floppy disks. This past year, we’ve also covered efforts in Germany and Japan to leave floppy disks behind. We’ve even covered the SFMTA’s prior troubles getting floppies replaced among concerns of “catastrophic failure” potential. In that story, we quoted an SFMTA executive on ABC7 explaining that running rail services was introduced “in an era when computers didn’t have hard drives.” It’s also worth noting that the SFMTA control system uses bulkier 5.25-inch floppy drives, not standard 3.5-inch floppies or larger 8-inch floppies.
Speaking to Ars Technica in April, SFMTA spokesperson Michael Roccaforte explained the current floppy-reliant Automatic Train Control (ATCS) system: “When a train enters the subway, its onboard computer connects to the train control system to run the train in automatic mode, where the trains drive themselves while the operators supervise. When they exit the subway, they disconnect from the ATCS and return to manual operation on the street.”
Roccaforte also explained to Ars Technica separately that the existing ATCS cables are incredibly fragile and have “less bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem.” This makes plans to upgrade the communications systems alongside replacing floppy drives seem near-essential to modernize the Muni Metro rail system. The days of networking in kilobytes instead of megabytes (or sometimes even gigabytes) are long past us.
As of now, the SFMTA’s complete Muni Metro overhaul is expected to be completed in 2033 or 2034. The short-term communications overhaul, which will replace cables and floppies, is expected to be finished by 2027 or 2028, followed by an “on-street technology installation phase.” This date roughly lines up with the original 2028 goal date for replacing the floppy disks currently used for the control system.
