Opinion | Shanghai's maglev passenger traffic lower than expected
Passengers give city's high-speed wonder a pass in favour of cheaper and more convenient metro
Shanghai's 30-kilometre maglev railway has seen its business so pummelled by the expansion of the city's metro system it is increasingly becoming a white elephant, leaving city officials red-faced.
The world's first commercial magnetic levitation railway, built at a cost of about 10 billion yuan, was touted by Shanghai as the envy of the world and proof of its commitment to the latest and best in technology.
When the line linking Pudong airport and Longyang Road - in the suburbs and next to the Zhangjiang industrial zone - opened at the end of 2002, it launched China's high-speed-railway dream. State leaders at first planned to build a national maglev railway network.
The technology for the line was developed by a German consortium comprising ThyssenKrupp, Siemens and Adtranz, and allows trains to reach a top speed of more than 500km/h.
However, the central government baulked at the high cost of maglev and at concerns about its safety, and decided to use a different, domestically developed technology when construction of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line began in the first half of 2008.
A planned Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev line was also put on ice by the central and local governments amid scepticism over the project's feasibility.