Ticket machines

Once upon a time, if you wanted to buy a rail ticket or a car park ticket, you gave your money to a person, who would give you a ticket in exchange. Nowadays, you give your money to a machine, and the machine may not even give you a physical ticket. In the case of the station car park, automatic number plate recognition is used to identify when you drive into the car park and when you leave the car park, and compare that with the amount of money you paid into the machine to make sure that you paid enough.

I suppose this is some kind of progress.