I don’t see why degradation of the individual physical floppies is a concern, since they can be imaged and written onto new(er) floppies, or the system retrofitted to read the same data from a different medium, but I can see where a more modern system would provide a lot of advantages. It doesn’t really sound like anyone in this article knows the nitty gritty details that well, though the bit about the loop cable is good.

The SFMTA is looking to upgrade to “modern technologies, such as fiber optic or Wi-Fi,” Roccaforte said.

PLEASE do not use wifi to run your trains lmao