Dave Newt wrote:

There USED to be massive queues at the start of the month, yeah. But
they brought in new, better, faster, multifunction, reliable,
multilingual ticket machines, and ****loads of them, and the queuing
problem really just disappeared.

Come to think of it, what really changed it was the ability to buy
monthlies from a machine. I moved there in 1996, and I think they
started selling them from machines the year after, as I remember having
to queue the first few months I lived there, but not after that.