by Jay Kana

With everyone living increasingly busy lives and using our cellphones as our primary means of communication, the City of Mississauga has partnered with the Pingstreet mobile app to create a centralized source for plenty of city information.

Say you’re driving on Hurontario and you notice a pothole. You do a safe maneuver to avoid it and think “I hope that gets filled soon because the next driver may ruin his suspension/tire/rim if they don’t avoid it”.
Or perhaps you see some graffiti that you’d like removed by the city and you think, “once I get home and settled after dinner and wind down and put the kids to bed, I’ll fire up my laptop/computer and let the city know.” Really though, on the priority scale and the effort scale, chances are that it’ll get pushed to the bottom of the list. And that’s absolutely understandable.

What the Pingstreet app allows you to do is report the problem through their incredibly user-friendly app (you can also upload a picture) and within a couple of minutes, the city will be informed about said pothole.

Or let’s say you’re visiting friends or family over the holidays and decide that you need to spend the night. Maybe there’s a sudden snowstorm, or you simply ‘celebrated the holidays’ a little too hard. Instead of having to plan ahead and get a parking permit in advance from the City of Mississauga’s website, or worse still, try to navigate the parking permit’s less-than-mobile-friendly page on your phone screen in the middle of the night, you can use the app and your parking permit is a few taps away. 

I see it as a great way to have residents easily connect with the city, the operative word being easy.
Because that’s what we want as residents. We want to be able to have our voices heard, we want to have our city looking as beautiful as possible all the time, and we want to know what’s happening around us.

Here’s what you’ll have instant access to with the app:

• Contact info for the Mayor and Ward Councillors
• Latest news releases
• Upcoming community events and committee meetings
• Garbage and recycling schedules and info
• The Discover Mississauga website
• Parking permit information
• Meetings and events

There’s even a “Manage Notifications” settings so you’ll receive the latest info on topics of your choice right to your phone. As mentioned, the app is absolutely free and a great communication tool to stay current with what’s going on in our city.

Best of all, it’s truly multi-platform - Pingstreet is available not just for iOS and Android, but also BlackBerry and Windows Phone. To make it easy to get the app, all you have to do is click here, scroll to the bottom of the page, choose which mobile device you use, and install the app.