A single document - Traffic In Towns, the Buchanan Report of 1963 - has ensured a place for Professor Sir Colin Buchanan, who died on December 6th aged 94, in the history of town planning worldwide. Almost 40 years after its publication, the vision and sweep of this volume, very much Colin Buchanan's personal achievement, remains undiminished, and its thinking completely up-to-date for the current debates on transport and our urban environment.
The report made him world famous. For the first time, it presented, in an accessible, readable and intelligent way, the whole picture of how transport and cities were inter-related, and what options could be pursued to accommodate economic growth, as well as individuals' aspirations to greater mobility. Many of its propositions already existed in one form or another, but Colin Buchanan's masterly synthesis set out the options available to society when striving to accommodate what he dubbed "the monster we love" - the car.
Subsequently, he suffered to a degree from misunderstanding - or wilful misinterpretation - of his main thesis. His argument, lucid and entirely understandable, was that existing towns and cities had a finite physical capacity - based on their existing urban fabric, character and buildings - to absorb motor vehicles. If society, he argued, then wishes to have greater mobility and full access to front doors, this can certainly be achieved, but at an enormous cost, both financial and in terms of loss of existing buildings and character.
The Buchanan Report became one of the most surprising bestsellers ever printed by the Stationery Office and led to an abridged version being published in paperback by Penguin Books. It was translated into several languages. Copies of the full report are still harboured carefully on planners' bookshelves around the world, and occasional requests for signatures in them, more than 30 years later, testified to its place in planning literature.
A larger-than-life figure, Colin Buchanan was the fourth in a line of Scottish civil engineers. He was born and brought up in Simla, India, before going to Berkhamsted school, from which he undertook an engineering training at Imperial College, London (1926-'29).
After buying his first car, he took up camping, making his own tents with a sewing machine; do-it-yourself, carpentry, caravans and motor-homes remained his enduring passions.
From 1935 until the outbreak of the second World War, Colin Buchanan worked in the Exeter office of the Ministry of Transport, where he was responsible for trunk road improvements all over the south-west of England. His interest in traffic and road safety grew through photographing traffic conditions and accident blackspots, and he visited Germany to see the autobahns.
A combination of an inquiring mind, an overseas childhood and a deep vein of stubbornness led to his questioning accepted wisdom on the role and impact of the motor vehicle in towns. He also had a lively curiosity about the behaviour of human beings and their motor vehicles; on one occasion, in search of suitable illustrations for his personal research into driver behaviour, he reportedly photographed a ministry superior unknowingly, while the latter was performing a dangerous manoeuvre on the road.
This love-hate relationship with the car was allied to a passionate interest in what is now called environmental planning, especially the theories of the Swedish urbanist Alker Tripp, whose concept of promoting cities as a set of environmentally protected precincts was to be taken up with great subtlety and power in the 1963 report.
In 1958, his book, Mixed Blessing: The Motor In Britain, appeared. This, and his 1960 report on the redevelopment of London's Piccadilly Circus, led to the change in his fortunes from that of an unwilling occupant of technical backrooms to an international celebrity.
As minister of transport (1959-'64), Ernest Marples raised the profile of his office with a wide-ranging and percipient intelligence. Preparing for a trip to the US in 1960 he asked for some background reading on urban transport, particularly on the impact of the motor car. Three books were produced, of which two were by Colin Buchanan.
On his return, Marples summoned the author, despite the misgivings of his officials, and the Traffic In Towns group came into being.
In 1964 the consultancy of Colin Buchanan and Partners was established. Colin Buchanan directed the teams preparing the Land Use and Transport Plan for Galway and, on behalf of the Government, the 1968 Regional Development Plan for Ireland, with its recommendations to expand Limerick and Cork in order to take future pressure off Dublin.
Other commissions that followed were the large-scale regional plan for South Hampshire, which included ground-breaking analysis of options for urban structure to accommodate growth and prosperity in this prime development corridor, and studies of historic cities such as Bath and Canterbury, in which the difficulties of reconciling movement by car with the conservation of the historic fabric were already obvious. The firm emerged a leader in international consultancy, with projects in Kuwait (from the early 1970s), Saudi Arabia, France and the Netherlands, besides numerous British towns and cities.
Yet for all his increasingly establishment credentials, Colin Buchanan remained something of a maverick. As early as 1958, as a planning inspector, he had questioned the need to locate a nuclear power station at Trawsfynnydd, in the Snowdonia national park, while his colleague from the ministry of power could see no reason why not. Typically, Colin Buchanan's case was based upon a brand of common sense perfectly understandable to laymen - why should a site of such physical beauty be compromised by an enormous structure, however well designed?
His appearances at public inquiries, or his written evidence, were always marked by great clarity, wit and considerable personal style. And the technical arguments were, as ever, impeccable.
On retirement from his practice in 1983, he expanded his pursuits and made occasional appearances on behalf of local communities against road-building programmes.
His wife Elsie, whom he married in 1933, died in 1984. He is survived by his sons, Malcolm and David, and daughter, Susan.
Colin Douglas Buchanan: born 1907; died, December 2001