Woodland-based smart-parking technology company Japa Inc. has contracted with the city of Woodland to build a connected technology for downtown on-street and city parking spaces.
Using the Japa app, drivers can find open parking spaces, and the app will tell them when their time is going to expire. The city will also use the app to more efficiently find cars parked for too long downtown.
“Parking is a tough problem, and it is a problem that is common for cities across the world,” Japa CEO Mathew Magno told the Business Journal, adding that the technology will help people more easily find spaces, and at the same time increase turnover to get more people downtown.
Woodland is the first city to use the system, but the company is in discussions with other cities in Northern California, Magno said. “We have a lot more coming.”
In Woodland, the company installed about 150 of its hard plastic sensors on parking spaces. The sensors can tell when a car is parked on the spot, and they communicate that to the cloud.
Woodland doesn’t have paid parking downtown, but it does have time limits for parking, generally about two hours.
Some cities use street cameras to monitor parking, but that raises privacy concerns, Magno said, adding that some cities are considering changing from cameras to Japa, because its sensors don’t raise privacy issues.
The areas of downtown Woodland that have Japa sensors installed also have signs directing people to the Japa app either by URL or by using a QR code.
Magno co-founded Japa in 2017 with Charles Chen, now chief technology officer, as a class project when they were both students at the University of California Davis. The company developed an app designed to help businesses, universities and cities manage their parking assets, while providing drivers with a mobile application that lets them know where to find an empty parking space. The app is used in conjunction with a plastic puck sensor, which is installed in parking spaces to relay data to building owners and drivers.
Japa has won first-place prizes at both the UC Davis Big Bang! Business Competition and the Sacramento Kings Capitalize contest. In 2019, the company landed a contract with Siemens Building Technologies to manage its parking systems. The same year, Japa inked a deal with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District to manage its 90-space, three-story garage.
Japa’s hardware and software will also provide the city of Woodland with data about downtown parking trends.
Japa's largest installation to date is more than 2,000 sensors installed at the University of California Berkeley.
