[nvahalik]

I don't understand.

The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters.

Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

[cortesoft]

I don't think that is actually a concern. The article is written in a way to imply that it is, but I doubt the people who are running the system actually think that is the risk.

I am sure they have copies of the floppy disk, and likely have images on other machines that can be used to create a new floppy even if all the copies are lost.

I feel like the SFMTA is mainly using the existence of the floppy disks as a marketing point for their desire to get funding to update the system. It is something that the average person will be able to look at and know it is out of date in a visceral way.

The reporter seems to read this as if we are one bad floppy away from failure, but that is not the actual case.

[jdblair]

You are correct that this would be much simpler if the only goal was to replace the floppy disk part of the system.

The floppy disk angle is there to make a good headline. The article makes it clear this is a much bigger project than just replacing the floppy disks.

  "The detail[ed] project schedule will be finalized once we have a contractor onboard. This is effectively a multi-phase decade long project that starts with pieces of market street subway and pieces in the surface. Ultimately our goal is to have a single train control system for the entire rail system," said Tumlin.

[renewiltord]

SF has to make everything a big bang project because every project has equal large fixed cost. So whether you do a small thing or a big thing you do a big fixed cost thing first.

So SF always does the big thing because otherwise the overhead dominates.

[snakeyjake]

Playing video games on an old Apple II via a floppy emulator has a different set of requirements than a safety-critical application.

Lawyers will probably spend a year wrangling liability concerns.

I could probably replace a floppy drive on any system within a couple of weeks. I would not accept legal or financial liability for any such solution without an extremely thorough and slow review of all aspects of the project. edit: and an astronomically high paycheck.

[pessimizer]

> However, budget challenges put the project's timeline into question. The SFMTA's train upgrade project isn't just a migration off of floppy disks but also a "complete overhaul of the current train control system and all its components, including the onboard computers, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure," Roccaforte said.

> Much more critical than the dated use of floppy disks is the system's loop cable, which transmits data between the central servers and the trains and, according to Roccaforte, "has less bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem."

Also, they're already late as hell, what's 5 more years? 5 1/4 isn't going to become more obsolete than it is at this point.

[inferiorhuman]

You don't need more "bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem" for train control. What Roccaforte left out is that the MTA spent over a decade trying to keep the trains from slicing up the inductive loop. No idea how the new trains are working out, but I'm pretty sure they never found a permanent fix for the old ones.

[lepus]

There are other concerns that need to be addressed where a hack wouldn't help:

>The transportation body says the train control system was built to last for just 20 to 25 years, meaning it surpassed its expected lifetime in 2023. In 2020, the Muni Reliability Working Group, said to be composed of local and national transit experts, recommended replacing the transit control system within five to seven years. [...] "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.

[ammo1662]

It is not a technical problem. Who will be responsible for this migration?

Clearly no one wants to do that.

[luxuryballs]

I think the government is involved which means the task must primarily be an effort to funnel large amounts of money around to just the right people while facilitating all the best changes to whatever they can find within N degrees of separation from the project itself, (where N approaches infinity.)

[jwells89]

Speaking naively (I have no insight into the situation), I would guess that this is probably the result of the officials in charge not having technical understanding and contracting it all out. Contractors aren’t going to be choosing the quick or cost-effective option, because that’d undercut their profits.

[deweller]

Also, it is difficult to sell a solution of "well - we aren't really modernizing the system, we are just putting a fix in place that pretends like it is a floppy drive."

I would guess higher ups don't want to spend money on a band-aid without really fixing the problem.

[krallja]

> higher ups don't want to spend money on a band-aid without really fixing the problem

I have literally never had this problem in my career. Higher-ups LOVE to push the problem off to after the next budget cycle.