As much as we complain about traffic every day in Honolulu, I think all of us can breathe a bit easier in a post-APECalyptic world.

I spent all of last week around the Hawai’i Convention Center during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings, and it certainly felt post-apocalyptic. There were no car engine hums. Business slowed to a crawl at the corner 7-Eleven. And everyone was walking, including myself.

I was pretty wary of how things would go from the beginning. I was at the convention center when they started to put up barriers at the Atkinson Drive and Kapiolani Boulevard intersection an hour earlier than they said they would.

"Boy, these guys are going to do whatever they want, whenever they want,"I told my colleagues.

It’s called being flexible, says city Department of Transportation Services Director Wayne Yoshioka.

"I think the key toward responding during APEC was the ability to be flexible and change things on the fly to adapt to changing conditions that were out there," he says.

He acknowledges that local officials had to accede to national and international security concerns. Various agencies at the state and county level had to work together, a foreshadowing of the city’s planned Joint Traffic Management Center.

"Although it was congested, it was very rare that it went into full gridlock," he says. "We were constantly out there changing things around, re-timing signals, moving barriers and even rerouting buses on the fly."

Yoshioka says the public is to be thanked for paying attention and taking recommended routes, like driving down Kapahulu Avenue into Waikiki. And it did work. Waikiki’s traffic was better than it ever has been due to most folks avoiding it like a pothole.

The city also was great about posting traffic alerts quickly via Twitter.

I know because I was monitoring its feed the whole week, and I was rebroadcasting all the information to my own followers and followers of the Star-Advertiser account.

But how did the public feel? I asked local residents on Facebook, and here’s what some had to say:

"My experience was OK," says Chris Kwock. "I stayed home and avoided the roads for the three-day weekend. The one time I did go out, there wasn’t much traffic as no one was traveling during that time thankfully."

Sarah Pacheco says the media and government agencies did a good job getting the word out. "I knew where and when everything was going down, and planned accordingly."

How was your APECalypse?

Reach Gene Park at gpark@staradvertiser.com, or Twitter as @GenePark.