ESCONDIDO ---- A community briefing on highway construction projects along the north Interstate 15 corridor became a community forum on urban planning when the featured guest speaker, a Caltrans project manager, failed to show up Tuesday morning.

About 40 people gathered at the Escondido Chamber of Commerce to hear about what Caltrans had cooked up for the next year or so instead were left to blaze their own trail, and most of them seemed to agree that transportation planning alone was not an adequate way to address the problems they see building in North County. (The speaker had mistakenly scheduled his appearance for today.)

One of the greatest problems confronting businesses in North County, in their view, is not just an inadequacy of freeways to move people between home and work, but also the sheer scale of distances employees must move between home and their workplaces.

"Everything in downtown San Diego that was rental housing is becoming condominiums," said Michael Friedman, a certified public accountant who commutes from his Escondido home to an office in the heart of San Diego.

"What are people supposed to do who cannot afford to buy the condominiums? They wind up living a long way from where they work and having to commute," he said.

"I can see that same thing happening right now in downtown Escondido, said Debra Rosen, chief executive officer of Escondido's Downtown Business Association.

The audience-turned-discussion-panel registered general agreement with the thought that ever-longer commutes hurt businesses, especially the kind that tend to locate in downtown settings.

"The people in charge of finding a solution to our transportation problems get stuck inside the box," said Gary Knight, president and chief executive of San Diego North Economic Development Council, which sponsored the aborted briefing.

"They can't get outside the paradigm to look at creative alternatives," Knight said, "but we don't have that problem in this group: we have an opportunity to look for solutions before we're mired in the problem."

Workers commuting to jobs in North County and San Diego now are buying homes as far away as Palm Springs or Imperial County, he said, and face commute distances of 2.5 hours each way.

Escondido City Councilman Ed Gallo suggested that a key to reducing transportation congestion, and thus reducing commuting times, is extending the hours of operation of the U.S.-Mexico border crossings near San Diego.

"We need to get trucks to make deliveries at midnight, but they can't do that when the (Otay Mesa truck) border crossing closes at 8 p.m.," Gallo said.

Abandoning uniform daily schedules was championed by Dennis Guseman, dean of the College of Business Administration at Cal State San Marcos.

"I used to live in Colorado, and we had worse water problems there than Southern California has," Guseman said.

"We rationed water by deciding who could use it on which days. We could do the same thing with business here, just by staggering business hours so commuters weren't all using the freeway at once," he said.

"I've always marveled at Disneyland," said Knight. "No matter how many people they have there, they're always able to get them moved through the park, onto the rides, then back to their cars. Why can't we do that on the freeways?"

Alex Galenes of America's Best Business Broker in Escondido said he didn't think the real problem was transportation at all.

"I see this as a massive failure of urban planning," he said.

"But that's water under the bridge ---- we have to look at a much broader list of things than just building highways if we really want to solve these problems," the Escondido businessman said.

Relieving congestion could be as simple as enticing people to live in or near the places where they work, although that is not as easy as it might seem.

"We're exacerbating the problem if we create residences and don't bring in enough jobs to go with them," said Suzanne Strassburger, director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Cal State San Marcos.

"And the residences we create have to be affordable ---- something we have to define. We have to decide what we mean when we say 'affordable;' Is it houses without land, or does it mean 'I can afford it?"

Knight pointed out that affordability is an important issue in North County, where, as he put it, "out of every 100 people who go looking for a home, 80 will find one, and only 9 will be able to buy one."

Contact staff writer Edmond Jacoby at (760) 739-6675 or ejacoby@nctimes.com .

Briefing scheduled

San Diego North Economic Development Council is sponsoring another community briefing dealing with highway projects along the Interstate 5 corridor from 3:30 to 5 p.m. today at the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce, 5934 Priestly Drive. The speaker will be Arturo Jacobo, a project director for the California Department of Transportation.