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SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

abc7news.com

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Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#21

Post by asdff »

nerdjon wrote: post #10

Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the timeline for the transition and how just that they are still doing this. What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad? Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs more funding but there is also jus…

I think about this all the time every time I see an lcd screen in my local train stations. If people who designed them actually used transit, maybe they'd have the signs you can only see as you walk out of the station say something about the bus lines you'd transfer to, instead of when the train behind you that just departed from is set to arrive. At some stations the screens they installed don't display anything useful at all, not when the next train will come, just the date and time as if everyone doesn't have that in their pocket, and this needs to be displayed every 25 feet on the platform.

A lot of transit could be fixed by just taking a regular routine user, empowering them to become a dictator for a week and point out all the friction points they hit actually using the system. But then that would make the entire bureaucratic system that is the transit agency look like idiots who don't understand their own jobs, so it will unfortunately never be done.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#22

Post by Solvency »

nerdjon wrote: post #10

Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the timeline for the transition and how just that they are still doing this. What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad? Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs more funding but there is also jus…

[flagged]

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#23

Post by xcrunner529 »

asdff wrote: post #21
nerdjon wrote: post #10

Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the timeline for the transition and how just that they are still doing this. What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad? Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs more funding but there is also jus…

I think about this all the time every time I see an lcd screen in my local train stations. If people who designed them actually used transit, maybe they'd have the signs you can only see as you walk out of the station say something about the bus lines you'd transfer to, instead of when the train behind you that just departed from is set to arrive. At some stations the screens they installed don't display anything use…

Well and lots that don’t even take the transit they manage. It’s just so infuriating.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#24

Post by renewiltord »

jdblair wrote: post #12
nvahalik wrote: post #7

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?

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 w…

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.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#25

Post by nerdjon »

asdff wrote: post #21
nerdjon wrote: post #10

Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the timeline for the transition and how just that they are still doing this. What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad? Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs more funding but there is also jus…

I think about this all the time every time I see an lcd screen in my local train stations. If people who designed them actually used transit, maybe they'd have the signs you can only see as you walk out of the station say something about the bus lines you'd transfer to, instead of when the train behind you that just departed from is set to arrive. At some stations the screens they installed don't display anything use…

I feel like almost every screen I just ignore, either it was just put there for ads or it is wrong/broken.

It is now a fairly regular occurrence to have a train show up that the screen had no reference too existing a minute or two before.

But yeah it feels like they were not designed or setup by people that actually use the trains and were setup by a comity thinking they know best.

Maybe that is the big difference, in other countries the people using it are also the ones managing it?

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#28

Post by ipaddr »

Solvency wrote: post #22
nerdjon wrote: post #10

Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the timeline for the transition and how just that they are still doing this. What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad? Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs more funding but there is also jus…

[flagged]

Real dollars that go to the poorest people's pockets to pay for food for undernourished children.

Not everyone is as rich as you. For the people who are, you can donate your nickels to your city every year.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#29

Post by FpUser »

>""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 told ABC7."

Do they know that floppy can be backed up?

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