A lot of subways have accepted the use of contactless credit cards or debit cards by touching the readers at the gates to pay for the fares. BART and MUNI still use Clipper card only.
I’ve asked someone work inside and he said the suppliers of the readers won’t upgrade them. Not sure what the deal is.
They also support Apple’s Transit card (Clipper card in your Apple Wallet) so it works by tapping your phone, without unlocking it. It should also work with your iPhone turned off (newer models I think iPhone 14+ only)
Given that you can, fairly easily, get a virtual stored value card on your phone, arguably little reason to change. As a visitor to SF, I was able to set up a virtual Clipper card and top it up in a few seconds, and it's presumably a lot cheaper and less complex for the operator (doesn't require talking to card networks).
Though, I still have ~$8 Clipper credit on my phone that I may or may not ever use...
I had $20 on the old magnetic strip card that was never used and got obsoleted. I had Clipper cards laying around with various remaining balances. I suspect the loose changes gained by the operators gave them less incentives to move forward.
> he said the suppliers of the readers won’t upgrade them. Not sure what the deal is.
It's not worth the money to the suppliers to go through the trouble of managing the upgrade of that one system alone; likely there's an opportunity cost where they have limited resources and they want to focus on the bigger projects making bigger impacts and bigger sales.
The last building I lived in, the sliding balcony doors were all starting to wear out. Building management called the company that made the doors to ask them about repairs or replacement and were told that the cost of replacing the doors for people isn't worth their time; basically, why would they come fix our old balcony doors for $x when they could spend their time on building and installing new balcony doors on a new build for $xx?
Too bad word gets around too slowly to actually make a difference in those new install numbers. Ideally, a company like that would lose sales to someone who offered better service to existing customers (who want to spend more money with you).
"Whole new system" means basically putting Wifi AP's in the station, and on the trains and using WiFi localization technology that has been around for ages. Most of the money in that quote comes from the 20 year service plan (read: paying a few techs making $30-40/hr to be on call for 20 years). Should it really cost that much? Probably not.
Well, "basically putting Wifi APs in the station and on the trains" isn't really what you want for a billion-dollar organization that handles 140 million rides a year.
You need redundancy, upgraded communications paths, you need it to handle interference, you need it to work above and below ground, you need it to be secured.
The 20-year service plan needs to include replacing hardware that fails (instead of just saying "sorry we don't make that anymore"); it needs to include security updates, expansions, it needs to include monitoring, it needs to include people knowing how the system works and what it does for 20 years (and not just having people retire and taking knowledge with them).
It includes training, it includes escalation and SLAs, it includes the software (which will likely need to be customized for SF MUNI's specific needs), bug fixes, hardware support. It needs to support whatever OS they're running 18 years from now instead of just saying "Run Windows 10 on your clients until 2034 when it's 20 years old and you have to pay Microsoft for extended support".
It boggles the mind that people on HN of all places look at short-form newspaper articles summarizing complex systems they don't understand and then post the most uninformed, reductionist armchair takes imaginable.
The headline's kinda clickbait (they're not charging $212M to replace some floppy drives or anything; it's a whole new system).
However, I always wonder with these weird old floppy-dependent systems... Where on earth are they getting the floppy disks at this point? They don't last forever. As far as I can see, no-one actually makes them anymore; are they just depleting a reserve supply?
The other slightly odd part is that the system was put in in _1998_, at which point floppy dependence was already a _bit_ on the archaic side. Possibly Hitachi just had an old system going cheap...
Just that thinking about the "floppy drive in 1998" question.
I can think of a couple of things at play
The system was likely designed a long time before 1998, because of how this type of contract works
Even in 1998 USB was very new, so thumb drives weren't an option
CDs were ubiquitous, but cd writers were not
Proprietary tech was available, Zip and Jazz drives come to mind, or maybe even minidisc in that timeframe, but any would have been a poor choice in hindsight
Tape would presumably have been considered, but was already notorious for long term compatibility (in 99 I had to restore from a tape backup that was only a couple of years old and we couldn't easily find compatible hardware)
There were other proprietary optical storage media in the market, but they were expensive and aimed at the long term storage market (heaven help you if that's how your archives are stored)
If they needed a cheap, easily written, and distributable media, they didn't have a lot of good choices.
We still don't have a good choice for this if you want your system air gapped. I sure as hell wouldn't let anyone plug a USB device into a safety critical system
It's probably a case where their warranty/support contract doesn't support MUNI replacing the existing hardware, and they don't want to certify new hardware for a 26 year old system.
I do wonder if they just have a stack of hermetically-sealed floppy disks that they have to swap to when one of them dies, or if they're just raw-dogging their redundancy.
> The other slightly odd part is that the system was put in in _1998_, at which point floppy dependence was already a _bit_ on the archaic side
Yeah, but stuff like train signalling systems don't get a full overhaul every year. The system in question was probably designed a decade earlier, and just evolved bit by bit.
But it's definitely funny in context. For reference, in the same timeframe Paris was constructing its first fully automatic (no driver) metro line, after the successes in Lyon, Toulouse, Lille a decade prior. Toulouse and Lille have fully automated metros.
Expo '86 in Vancouver is when they launched the Skytrain, a completely automated, driverless system which continues to be automated and driverless today.
Granted Vancouver is smaller than probably any of the other cities mentioned, but it's still interesting that the technology existed so long ago (and, apparently, ran on OS/2? That's what I've heard, anyway).
... Huh. I had it in my head that this was a tiny slow system, I think because I'd somehow conflated it with Seattle's smol monorail (which I think was also designed to be automated, though that ultimately did not happen). It's... a lot bigger than I thought, fairly impressive for 1980s automation.
Apparently some London tube lines used ATO since the 60s, though it was kind of the equivalent of ADAS Level 3; the driver had to be _there_, and occasionally do stuff (in particular they're responsible for opening the doors, presumably so that they don't drift off entirely).
This isn't really about the floppy disks; it's about the installation of a new signalling system but it does make a good headline.
The title is misspelled. It should be “Muni”, like the article's title, not in all caps.
A lot of subways have accepted the use of contactless credit cards or debit cards by touching the readers at the gates to pay for the fares. BART and MUNI still use Clipper card only.
I’ve asked someone work inside and he said the suppliers of the readers won’t upgrade them. Not sure what the deal is.
> BART and MUNI still use Clipper card only.
They also support Apple’s Transit card (Clipper card in your Apple Wallet) so it works by tapping your phone, without unlocking it. It should also work with your iPhone turned off (newer models I think iPhone 14+ only)
Given that you can, fairly easily, get a virtual stored value card on your phone, arguably little reason to change. As a visitor to SF, I was able to set up a virtual Clipper card and top it up in a few seconds, and it's presumably a lot cheaper and less complex for the operator (doesn't require talking to card networks).
Though, I still have ~$8 Clipper credit on my phone that I may or may not ever use...
I had $20 on the old magnetic strip card that was never used and got obsoleted. I had Clipper cards laying around with various remaining balances. I suspect the loose changes gained by the operators gave them less incentives to move forward.
> he said the suppliers of the readers won’t upgrade them. Not sure what the deal is.
It's not worth the money to the suppliers to go through the trouble of managing the upgrade of that one system alone; likely there's an opportunity cost where they have limited resources and they want to focus on the bigger projects making bigger impacts and bigger sales.
The last building I lived in, the sliding balcony doors were all starting to wear out. Building management called the company that made the doors to ask them about repairs or replacement and were told that the cost of replacing the doors for people isn't worth their time; basically, why would they come fix our old balcony doors for $x when they could spend their time on building and installing new balcony doors on a new build for $xx?
Too bad word gets around too slowly to actually make a difference in those new install numbers. Ideally, a company like that would lose sales to someone who offered better service to existing customers (who want to spend more money with you).
Aren’t there higher end manufacturers of balcony doors, who do offer premium service?
https://archive.is/MBAJV
"Whole new system" means basically putting Wifi AP's in the station, and on the trains and using WiFi localization technology that has been around for ages. Most of the money in that quote comes from the 20 year service plan (read: paying a few techs making $30-40/hr to be on call for 20 years). Should it really cost that much? Probably not.
Well, "basically putting Wifi APs in the station and on the trains" isn't really what you want for a billion-dollar organization that handles 140 million rides a year.
You need redundancy, upgraded communications paths, you need it to handle interference, you need it to work above and below ground, you need it to be secured.
The 20-year service plan needs to include replacing hardware that fails (instead of just saying "sorry we don't make that anymore"); it needs to include security updates, expansions, it needs to include monitoring, it needs to include people knowing how the system works and what it does for 20 years (and not just having people retire and taking knowledge with them).
It includes training, it includes escalation and SLAs, it includes the software (which will likely need to be customized for SF MUNI's specific needs), bug fixes, hardware support. It needs to support whatever OS they're running 18 years from now instead of just saying "Run Windows 10 on your clients until 2034 when it's 20 years old and you have to pay Microsoft for extended support".
It boggles the mind that people on HN of all places look at short-form newspaper articles summarizing complex systems they don't understand and then post the most uninformed, reductionist armchair takes imaginable.
The headline's kinda clickbait (they're not charging $212M to replace some floppy drives or anything; it's a whole new system).
However, I always wonder with these weird old floppy-dependent systems... Where on earth are they getting the floppy disks at this point? They don't last forever. As far as I can see, no-one actually makes them anymore; are they just depleting a reserve supply?
The other slightly odd part is that the system was put in in _1998_, at which point floppy dependence was already a _bit_ on the archaic side. Possibly Hitachi just had an old system going cheap...
Just that thinking about the "floppy drive in 1998" question.
I can think of a couple of things at play
The system was likely designed a long time before 1998, because of how this type of contract works
Even in 1998 USB was very new, so thumb drives weren't an option
CDs were ubiquitous, but cd writers were not
Proprietary tech was available, Zip and Jazz drives come to mind, or maybe even minidisc in that timeframe, but any would have been a poor choice in hindsight
Tape would presumably have been considered, but was already notorious for long term compatibility (in 99 I had to restore from a tape backup that was only a couple of years old and we couldn't easily find compatible hardware)
There were other proprietary optical storage media in the market, but they were expensive and aimed at the long term storage market (heaven help you if that's how your archives are stored)
If they needed a cheap, easily written, and distributable media, they didn't have a lot of good choices.
We still don't have a good choice for this if you want your system air gapped. I sure as hell wouldn't let anyone plug a USB device into a safety critical system
You can get floppy drive emulator gizmos that slot in and connects to the ?Floppy Disk Connector?, then you have a flash drive it reads/writes to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulato...
Still just as slow, but no read/write failures.
Not sure if there’s an actual disk doohickey that plugs into any drive, but probably.
It's probably a case where their warranty/support contract doesn't support MUNI replacing the existing hardware, and they don't want to certify new hardware for a 26 year old system.
I do wonder if they just have a stack of hermetically-sealed floppy disks that they have to swap to when one of them dies, or if they're just raw-dogging their redundancy.
Tom Persky at https://www.floppydisk.com/ is selling them for a few more years yet.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/20/floppy_disk_business/...
You can get a 10 pack for 15 bucks.
Huh. Good to know there's a solution, I suppose... Even if it's uncomfortably dependent on one guy and his warehouse full of disks.
> The other slightly odd part is that the system was put in in _1998_, at which point floppy dependence was already a _bit_ on the archaic side
Yeah, but stuff like train signalling systems don't get a full overhaul every year. The system in question was probably designed a decade earlier, and just evolved bit by bit.
But it's definitely funny in context. For reference, in the same timeframe Paris was constructing its first fully automatic (no driver) metro line, after the successes in Lyon, Toulouse, Lille a decade prior. Toulouse and Lille have fully automated metros.
Expo '86 in Vancouver is when they launched the Skytrain, a completely automated, driverless system which continues to be automated and driverless today.
Granted Vancouver is smaller than probably any of the other cities mentioned, but it's still interesting that the technology existed so long ago (and, apparently, ran on OS/2? That's what I've heard, anyway).
https://vancouversun.com/news/metro/inside-the-skytrain-cont...
... Huh. I had it in my head that this was a tiny slow system, I think because I'd somehow conflated it with Seattle's smol monorail (which I think was also designed to be automated, though that ultimately did not happen). It's... a lot bigger than I thought, fairly impressive for 1980s automation.
Apparently some London tube lines used ATO since the 60s, though it was kind of the equivalent of ADAS Level 3; the driver had to be _there_, and occasionally do stuff (in particular they're responsible for opening the doors, presumably so that they don't drift off entirely).
They should upgrade to minidiscs and truly welcome the cyberpunk dystopian future.
Shamefully dishonest headline.
For $212M I think keeping the floppy disks are worth it.
The floppies are a red herring that makes for a catchy headline, they're paying $212M to replace the whole train control system from 1998.
Sounds much better than $20 Gotek /s