Alert: Readers have probably noticed that an advertisement for the upcoming “virtual meeting” being held by “SR-710 Conversations,” the outreach program designed to solicit feedback from the community on how to, in Metro’s and Caltrans’ words, “address one of the longest-standing transportation issues in our region: the SR-710 gap.”

I’m sure this might come as something of a surprise to some of our readers who would correctly note that Streetsblog has been awfully critical of this project, and have even come up with our own name for it, the SR 710 Big Dig West.  But one of the goals of Streetsblog is to get people concerned with progressive transportation to get out to public meetings on transit and other transportation projects.  Accepting advertisements from agencies that advertise these meetings helps us meet that goal in two pretty obvious ways.

Also, this particular project is interesting in a second way.  Because they’re advertising a first-of-its-kind virtual meeting, the kind done completely over the Internet, this could be a preview of what’s to come in the world of public outreach.  I’ll be away next week when the meeting goes live, but you know that we’ll have someone covering it.