Colin Buchanan

Sir Colin Douglas Buchanan CBE (22 August 1907 – 6 December 2001) was a Scottish town planner. He became Britain's most famous transport planner following the publication of Traffic in Towns in 1963, which presented a comprehensive view of the issues surrounding the growth of personal car ownership and urban traffic in the UK.

Life Buchanan was born in 1907 in Simla, India, a descendant of a long line of Scottish civil engineers. He was educated at Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, before studying engineering at Imperial College, London. as car numbers in the UK were expected to quadruple over the coming decades. It gave planners a set of policy blueprints to deal with its effects on the urban environment, including traffic containment and segregation, which could be balanced against urban redevelopment, new corridor and distribution roads and precincts. These policies shaped the development of the urban landscape in the UK and some other countries for two or three decades. In 1964 Penguin Books published Traffic in Towns, which was a concise version of the 1963 Buchanan Report.

Buchanan retired from the Ministry in 1963, and held the new Chair of Transport at Imperial College London,

Between 1973 and 1975 Colin Buchanan was head of the newly established School of Advanced Urban Studies at Bristol University.

The commission's 1971 report recommended that a site at Cublington in Buckinghamshire (to the northwest of London) should be developed as London's third airport, but in a minority opinion Buchanan totally rejected the 146-page economic analysis proposing Cublington, because of the policy need to protect the open countryside around London: "It is simply unthinkable that an airport and all it implies should be brought here", and recommended Maplin Sands (also known as Foulness) to the east of London.

An Act of Parliament was passed – the Maplin Development Act 1973 – that paved the way for a Thames Estuary Airport at Maplin Sands. However, the Maplin proposal was shelved after the 1973 oil crisis, and all plans for a new four-runway airport were replaced by smaller-scale redevelopment of Stansted, a site not short-listed by the Roskill Commission.

Between 1980 and 1985 Buchanan was the President of the Council for the Protection of Rural England.

Buchanan died at his home in Oxford on 6 December 2001 of bronchopneumonia.

Publications