The machines have very limited functionality (single trip tickets, one
day
bus passes and that's it) so are not well used IMX. If TfL were
commercially
aware, they could have added Travelcard functionality and the ability to
pay
by credit/debit card, but they aren't so they didn't.

Nothing to do with commercial awareness and everything to do with the
fact that the machines are simply *******ised car park machines. They
could never issue Travelcards because they need to be magnetically
encoded. This would add to the capital cost, maintenance cost and
consumable costs. Also a bit pointless when there is a dense rail
network which can vend such tickets plus thousands of Ticket Stops which
can also do so.

One thing which they won't do, which drives me around the bend, is sell you
two single tickets in exchange for a £2 coin. If a £2 coin is all you have,
you can only buy a single £1 ticket and receive no change. I expected I
could just press the £1 ticket twice to get it to print 2 and charge me
£2... but no. Grr! It's caught me out a couple of times!

D.