Quinte West alerts available at your fingertips

The Pingstreet mobile app gives instant notifications on important city updates, such as road closures and government events. Photo courtesy of Tony Niederer, eSolutionsGroup

By Rachel Stark

BELLEVILLE – Thanks to local mobile app advancements, Quinte West municipality updates will now be more easily accessible.

Pingstreet, a mobile app for up-to-date alerts about happenings in Quinte West, was created through partnership with local web developers and eSolutionsGroup, the same Waterloo, Ont., company that helped build the City of Quinte West website.

Donna McCormick, web developer for the municipality, said when eSolutionsGroup suggested adding Quinte West to the app, it sounded like a perfect fit.

“If you’re out and about and want to know about the closest trail or nearby business, it’s there on the app,” she said. “I think that’s the way of the future, so it’s awesome.”

Pingstreet officially launched the Quinte West section of the app last Monday. The app now has 22 municipalities available, 17 in Ontario.

After you download and choose your location, the app gives eight sections of updates to choose from, like road closures and council meetings. 

Tony Niederer, head of marketing and sales at eSolutionsGroup, said the developer team continuously adds municipal information to the app.

McCormick “will be able to see which sections are used most often to know what’s most important to the users and what more would be good to add,” said Niederer.

Another app, to be called My Ride, is in the works by transportation service Quinte Access, a project to make special-needs transportation more accessible.

Shelli Ackers, administrator of Quinte Access, said the app will let users see real-time tracking of the organization’s bus schedule. Notifications about scheduled routes and late arrivals are a couple of the features the app is planned to have, according to Ackers.

“It will be a good asset for a lot of our riders so they can do their own thing rather than needing to call us all the time to ask where the buses are,” she said.

The My Ride app is expected to be done by the end of the year, she said.