The footpaths were cracked and uneven, as if they'd just been cobbled together by individual building owners instead of maintained by a public body.
And littering those footpaths were street vendors, motorbikes, market stalls and stray dogs basking in the sunlight.
Those with a bit more fearlessness (recklessness?) could hire a motorbike almost anywhere, and pray to get out alive. Road rules are more of a suggestion in Thailand than law. Car drivers pull out of driveways and side streets seemingly without looking, they just toot their horns in warning before pulling out wherever they like.
That goes a way towards explaining Thailand's high road-death rate of 32.2 deaths per 100,000 people.
New Zealanders are lambasted for our bad road toll and our death rate is 9.6 per 100,000.
Even the car-mad United States road-death rate is a much lower 12.7.
Unlike Thailand, at least it's easy to find a carpark in the US.
One figure I found estimated the country has two billion parking spaces for about 200 million cars.
One of Disney World's multiple large parking lots – one of them! – has 11,000 spaces and stretches more than 60 hectares.
An image I've seen circulating the internet is an aerial shot of MetLife Stadium, a large stadium near New York City, looking absolutely dwarfed by the carparks surrounding it.
The stadium's website proudly boasts of more than 2 million square feet (185,806 square metres) of parking or 28,000 parking spaces.
That's not a sight you're likely to see in much of Europe.
Public transport there is generally affordable, easy, and readily available.
Major cities like London and Paris are touted for their 'walkability', and road death rates there are among the lowest in the world – Switzerland's is 2.2, the United Kingdom's is 3.2 and France's is 5.1.
It's interesting to compare these three different styles of urban planning when looking at how we'd like to utilise our own public spaces.
New Zealand's terrain and small population influences our default transportation – the car.
Our largest city and our capital have train networks but the bus systems are generally more accessible. Outside those cities our options generally are buses, cars, or man-power.
So where does that leave us?
Here in the Bay of Plenty, the bus system is, well, not always great.
If you've got the luxury of being able to travel off-peak, buses can be quite pleasant and fast. But during the busy times, those buses can feel mighty inconvenient.
It gets worse when you've got to change a number of buses to get to your destination – a trip of a few kilometres can take an hour or more, depending on your route.
Travelling by car tends to be the easiest and most reliable option, even with traffic jams.
Parking can be a pain in the backside, but if you're willing to walk a bit or spend some cash, it's there.
But with a growing population, where should we be focusing?
As a car-reliant culture, most of us get pretty wound up at the thought of losing parking spaces. It's hard enough already to get a park, right? Why make it harder?
But what are we giving up for the sake of carparks?
Look at Tauranga – part of our prime waterfront land on The Strand is covered in gravel. It's land worth millions and millions of dollars and people park their cars there.
I'm sure my Toyota SUV loves the view though.
I did some basic maths. I looked up the rating information of four addresses on The Strand and used the estimated land values to get an average dollar value per square metre - $4405.
If we say a parking space is about 13sq m, the estimated land value of a single car park on The Strand is $57,265.
Obviously this isn't a truly accurate valuation but it does give you a rough idea of what we give up to park our cars.
It would be great to use all of our waterfront land to its highest potential – it is beautiful, steeped in history, and should be honoured as such. I am pleased to see Tauranga's city leaders planning for a central city with fewer carparks and better public transport.
But if they're going to take away our carparks, they better make damn sure there's a viable alternative that people will actually want to use.
Our bus system, as it stands, is not there yet.
There's no point further pedestrianising our city centre if we can't get the feet to beat the streets.
We've got to have the infrastructure to make it work.
Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader, and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a Millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.
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