$4.50, 8 minutes and 32 kilometers later, I can now boast to have ridden in a maglev 
Pretty anticlimatic actually. Definately worth doing once. I got pix of the clock and speedometer at 0, 100, 421 and 2 kph. Noise and vibration when moving about like a 747 when cruising. Shanghai is such a flat delta that the view from the elevated train was kinda cool. No strong g force acceleration or deceleration. Centrifigal force made it tough to walk straight during the long banked turn.
A lot of tourists, and I mean almost everyone on board did the maglev round trip rather than used it as a means for getting to the airport. I took it from the airport as a lark like a few others but never met anyone that seriously uses it as transportation.
The maglev goes from the airport to the middle of nowhere in the Shanghai suburbs, where you then get on the subway for a ride into town. Frankly, if it’s outside of rush hour, people like myself can go door to door from the airport in about 1/2 the time by taxi. Although a taxi costs about 4x more. I think there are 2 trains per hour on the weekend and only in the morning during the week.
So, while pretty cool, it’s largely useless and a pretty enormous waste of $1.2 billion, largely paid for by the German taxpayer.
Pretty mundane and pointless but I just had to share…