As the upper North Island was battered by torrential rain on Tuesday, many Aucklanders found themselves stuck in the city as roads were gridlocked and public transport was at a standstill.
People were first told to leave the city early, as a local state of emergency was declared, then, as everyone rushed out, travellers were told to delay travel.
Tim Welch, a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Auckland, said we need to reduce the number of cars "especially at a time of emergency so we need to make more space for public transportation so our city can flow".
"The thing we can do starting immediately and will have an immediate effect," Welch said, "is remove that on-street parking on our major roads and paint those lines for dedicated busways."
He said this would keep the busses moving, rather than having them stuck in traffic with the cars. Welch also pointed towards congestion charging as an immediate fix that would have significant impacts.
Congestion charges are fees for drivers entering the city at peak hours. It would reduce the number of people coming into the city alongside "demand for cars and the places we store them that occupy all those city streets so they could be used for other things".
"If we look at the North Shore where we have a dedicated busway, it's probably one of the most successful transportation projects in New Zealand," Welch said.
"It carries tonnes of people very fast, so if we could carry that across the bridge and into the city, we wouldn't see the problems to the level we are now."
He indicated light rail, especially on big streets, and a second harbour crossing as longer-term solutions that would take some investment but drastically increase the efficiency of our transport network.
Another major concern in Auckland this week was the flooding of major roads, such as Queen St. Welch said bioswales, a term for channels containing plants and trees, could replace areas where we now have on-street parking.
These bioswales would channel water down the street, letting it slowly drain into the ground, rather than creating impassable rivers of water.
"The important thing there is that it filters the water before it gets out to the sea so we would see less of beaches being closed all across the city every time we have a heavy rain... It would make us more resilient because it would cool our cities and reduce what we call that heat island effect."
Welch said it's essential New Zealand avoids disaster situations that look like sci-fi movies.
"We see where something terrible is happening and everybody's sitting in their car.
"We would want to prioritise getting people onto those public transportation modes very quickly. They're the highest capacity, the most efficient, they take up the least amount of space in the city," he said.
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