I don't remember it being so bad on my last trip, but a number of years back two of us were doing a long distance walk in England. I remember train tickets being this exercise of "Which of these cards are the right ones to feed into the turnstile?" while people were piling up behind us.

In general, transit systems do a pretty terrible job of usability testing for people who aren't so used to the system that it's second nature and may not even read the language.