Ben Fried

Nick Anderson / Houston Chronicle

Yesterday, at the end of our piece about the recent road rage incidents in usually-polite Portland and Seattle, we posed a question to Tom Vanderbilt, author of the forthcoming book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us. We asked: What is it about automobility that often seems to turn nice, normal people into impulsive, remorseless sociopaths -- blasting their horns, flying into fits of rage and wielding their vehicles like weapons in a crowded, pedestrian-dominated city.

Two recent road rage incidents are all over the news in Portland. Earlier this month, a drunken man on a bike became aggravated when a driver, himself a self-described bike advocate, reprimanded the cyclist for blowing a stoplight. The cyclist threatened the driver, picking up his bike and hitting the car with it. Then this week, a driver struck a cyclist and continued to drive as the victim, who escaped without serious injury, clung to the windshield.

In a story about the housing downturn, BusinessWeek had some numbers crunched to see where home prices have remained most stable and where they have declined most precipitously:

Transit agencies all over the country are nearing a state of emergency. At the same time that rising gas prices are leading more Americans to opt for buses and trains, transit operators are being forced to cut service and raise fares due to budget shortfalls.

Today we're launching a new feature on Streetsblog -- Wiki Wednesdays -- where we'll highlight new content coming online at StreetsWiki, the community-created livable streets knowledge base.

Via Carectomy, a San Francisco CBS affiliate reports that the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission is considering whether to revise the rules of the road to better accommodate cyclists. The changes would make it legal for cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs, and stoplights as stop signs.

Since we launched the Livable Streets Network one month ago, our community-created reference site, StreetsWiki, has steadily grown. There are now 132 articles contributed and maintained by LSN users. Knowing Streetsblog's audience, however, there's a lot of expertise among our readers still waiting to be tapped.