I drive on I-95 to and from work every day. I have used the express probably less then once a month, only when traffic is very bad. And by the looks of it, I am not the only person to do the same thing.
I commuted from Aberdeen to Baltimore during most of the building of this monstrosity. About as soon as it opened, I began working from home and missed out on the commute.
But, I can’t tell you how many times at all different times of day, I’ll track a car that got on the express lanes. He’s usually still in sight, sometimes in my mirror when he re-joins regular traffic.
The problem with the express lanes is that they don’t go far enough. Heading south, you’re dumped back into general traffic before the Fort McHenry Tunnel bottleneck. And going north, yeah it helps if you’re going to White Marsh, but otherwise you’re dumped back into general traffic well before you get to Bel Air.
The solution, at least on the south end, would have been to add two tunnel tubes and four lanes of traffic (two each way) from the tunnel down to I-395. But since it would probably be cheaper to establish colonies on Mars than it would be to build all that, a cheaper solution would have been to have one of the tunnel tubes be reversible, and have reversible lanes from there down to I-395. So, in the morning, you’d have a total of 4 general lanes plus 2 express lanes going south, and 2 general lanes going north; reverse that in the afternoon.
An added bonus of this would be that you could have both outbound lanes of I-395 to I-95 south continue through (in the afternoon) instead of having them merge into one lane, thus causing backups on I-395. (I.e. 2 general lanes on I-95 going south before I-395, plus the 2 lanes from I-395 heading to south I-95, joining together to form 4 lanes of I-95, which is what you have now.)
Yeah, I know, it all makes too much sense; so it’ll never happen.