FRISCO STILL FLUMMOXED BY FLOPPY DISKS: Muni says it’s ready to modernize S.F.’s subway, by tossing the floppy disks that control it.

San Francisco transportation officials have secured $41 million to modernize the city’s subway, chiefly to overhaul a train control system that still runs on floppy disks.

The money, awarded last month by the California Transportation Commission, came with rules attached. It’s targeted at efforts to manage congestion, including by making transit more reliable, and the funds must be directed toward capital infrastructure.

For leaders of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the timing seemed critical. Faced with a $322 million deficit next year, the agency has paused some projects and trimmed costs wherever possible to avoid drastically slashing service. Despite the obvious strain, SFMTA kept plodding ahead with an ambitious and desperately needed upgrade: a new $700 million renovation of Muni Metro train control.

Jokes about the antiquated technology that runs Muni’s subway have long made the rounds among riders. Automated train control surely made sense when San Francisco officials installed it in 1998, enabling computers to evenly space trains as they rolled underground between Embarcadero and West Portal stations, and later, in the Central Subway from Moscone Center to Chinatown-Rose Pak Station. Yet the software, stored on floppy disks that have to be loaded each morning, has passed its expiration date. Because automated train control transmits signals via loop cable wires, communication is slow and easily disrupted.

Flashback: “Shades of the New Yorker cover from 2013, which showed Obama with Gordon Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone and Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers while Jay Carney nervously inserted a five-inch floppy disk into the TRS-80-era Obamacare server. Not to mention the speeches that Newt Gingrich was giving during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, when he would hold up in one hand a vacuum tube, and in the other a microchip. As he explained, vacuum tubes were still in use in some FAA-regulated Air Traffic Control towers in America.” As I wrote back in 2019 responding to a Bloomberg News article that exclaimed:

San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology, but that’s what’s running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S.

Now who’s being naive, Kay? When I lived in Silicon Valley, the numerous power outages were a reminder that the businesses trying to bring you the 21st century were reliant upon a power grid that, thanks to the NIMBY nature of Bay Area leftists, hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s heyday of Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad.