Posts by Graeme Coates 12 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
This is the whole idea behind SCOOT systems (having computer controlled linked systems) - but it's all a load of rubbish as more often than not, it's not implemented correctly in the first place, or plainly doesn't work (or is *designed* not to work).
Google "Abingdon Integrated Transport Scheme" for an example of how to turn a flowing one way system in a 400 year old market town into an unpredictable and often gridlocked mess, killing all life in the town centre as a side-effect.
Road maintenance comes out of local council budgets so we do all pay for the roads, and while vehicle owners also pay VED, etc, it's not entirely true that road users pay for the majority of the cost of the roads (a big top rate earner pays more in income tax than most will spend on fuel/insurance/etc - should they get priority over one other individual?). Remember also that most cyclists also own cars, pay VED, insurance, fuel, but choose not to drive everywhere (I include myself in this category) - it's not fair to use the "I pay my road tax" argument in this situation either.
I believe the best estimate (though there is a lot of uncertainty) on the amount of damage done to a road is something like it being proportional to the fourth power of the axle load of the vehicle. So, if you want everyone to pay proportionally for their damage to the roads, peds and cyclists alike would owe about a penny over their lifetime for every pound of VED that covers the wear caused by a car. Short of global road tolls, this is probably one of the fairer ways of paying for road maintenance.
Of course, the road haulage industry wouldn't like this much as they would pay something like 1000-10000 times the "damage tax" compared to a car....
The black hole itself is by definition a point object (at least in our physics - this may not actually apply inside a black hole, but there's no better explanation at present...).
The event horizon of a black hole (ie the Schwarzchild radius for a non-rotating black hole) *will* grow according to the mass of the object - but it's only a mathematical definition, there's nothing physical at that distance - for supermassive black holes (centre of galaxy type stuff) it would be possible for a human to cross the event horizon with no ill effects (no turning to spagetti, etc). You'd never get out again, and wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it though...
Yes they are spectacular. The entire sky can turn red, green, purple with dancing curtains of light. It's easily visible to the naked eye, and can be very bright too - when in the right place at the right time. Just that most of the time, the right place is not the UK as we are at low of a magnetic latitude...
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