Time complexity of counting triangles in planar graphs
The number of occurrences of any fixed subgraph H in a planar graph G can be counted in O(n) time, even if H is disconnected. This, and several related results, are described in the paper Subgraph Isomorphism in Planar Graphs and Related Problems by David Eppstein of 1999; see Theorem 1. The paper indeed uses treewidth techniques.