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. 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==