I saved a post regarding the public transit system in Shanghai because it wouldn’t be complete until I left, which I will explain in a second. The city has a world-class subway system, with more than ten lines connecting most of Central Shanghai (covering 660 kilometers). The network is fast, clean, and packed during peak hours – although it is nowhere near as crammed as the Tokyo subway. My sense was that far fewer people were riding bikes in Shanghai compared with Beijing, although some of the slack was taken up by the motorized scooters that were much more prevalent. From my perspective, the main reason there were fewer cyclists was because there are far more cars. From what I saw in Beijing there are no expressways snaking through the city center, but in Shanghai they form a web emanating from the core. With that said my few taxi rides weren’t terrible. There was certainly some traffic, but overall we made it from one place to another quickly.

One big takeaway from Shanghai regarding transportation is that it is much more expensive than Beijing. The subway has a sliding scale approach similar to systems in Washington and San Francisco. Short trips were only fifty percent more expensive, but longer trips can be more than three times the cost (although it is still pretty cheap by American standards). What I don’t like about this method is that it provides a disincentive for people to travel further distances. Taxis were also at least twice the price, which didn’t bother me at all. The goal of policy should be to make all use of motor vehicles more expensive, so people will choose more sustainable modes. The problem in Shanghai is that there are so many wealthy people that the increased cost likely doesn’t dissuade many from using taxis. Once again, however, I found myself thinking that I would trade this transportation mix for just about any American city.

On my last morning, I took the Maglev train to the airport – which is why I saved this post until the end. So, what is a maglev train? It uses magnetic levitation to propel the train with magnets, meaning it has no wheels, axles, or bearings. The train literally hovers over the ‘track’ as it speeds to its destination – we averaged 300kph! These systems achieve such velocities with less energy expenditure compared with traditional wheeled trains because they are frictionless, with fighting air drag being the primary power requirement. There have been test systems that have achieved regular speeds exceeding 500kph (300mph), which would make them even more competitive with airliners then regular high-speed trains. The most significant problem that these trains face is that they have much larger initial construction costs. The upside is that they require less maintenance because there is less wear and tear on the network even when consistently operating at peak speeds. Therefore thelong-term operations costs are less than other high-speed trains.

The British, Germans, Japanese, and Americans have all been formally engaged in conducting research into this technology. A low-speed commercial system operated for about a dozen years in Birmingham, England. It discontinued service in the mid-1990s due to reliability problems. The Shanghai system is one of two commercial systems in operation today (the other is a low-speed system in Aichi, Japan). It was built in cooperation with the German Transrapid Consortium, at a cost of $1.2 billion for thirty kilometers of track. Even with this high level of expenditure and considering its relatively low ridership, the system already covers its operations costs. What is amazing is that the single line conducts more than one hundred trips daily, with a en route time of just seven minutes. There were plans to extend the line from Pudong Airport in the east to Hongqiao Airport in the west, traversing the downtown – but those plans have been put on hold.

The experience of riding the train was awesome. It is a sleek train with a modern station. Despite the fact that it is a very smooth ride, you really get the sense that you are moving quickly as you thunder past car traffic on a parallel highway. One of the most enjoyable parts of the transit was banking as the train took a turn, which reminded me of being on the Autobahn – without the concern about impending sudden death. For a train enthusiast, this was just tremendous. In the near-term it seems that this is an approach that will work well for localized systems. There is currently a handful of lines being considered or already in development around the globe. For long-distance travel it seems likely this could be the technology for Train 3.0 (with Train 1.0 being conventional trains and Train 2.0 being the current high-speed revolution). This is particularly when one considers that if this type of train operated in an airless tube it could theoretically operate at much higher speeds.A RAND study found that such a system, which would understandably be very costly to build, could transport a person from New York to Los Angeles in a bit over twenty minutes. Considering how much more sustainable this type of transportation would be compared with cars and planes and even current high-speed trains, this is a future worth dreaming about.