A peculiar analog ticket dispenser machine found in Montreal. Rather than printing tickets on-demand, a whole bunch of physical, paper tickets are pre-stocked in the machine and, like buying candy bars from a vending machine, you select your route and the machine drops a ticket down for you.

I’m curious why this exists. Was it a re-purposed vending machine? Or a sense that pre-printing was perhaps prone to failure?

I think this is quite fantastic and a curious reversal of common technophilic trends, where you might expect a machine to be linked to a larger network of databases and algorithms and printing machines. It’s post-optimal in this way; running against trends that assume just-in-time is the appropriate optimization strategy.