Dai, J., Sun, W., Lu, Q. L., Schmöcker, J. D., & Antoniou, C. (2025). Railway-station-area vitality in response to COVID-19: A case study of diverse Japanese cities. Cities, 105970.

This study examines the impact of COVID-19 on the number of visitors weighted by their time spent at facilities within and nearby railway stations, analyzing short-term demand losses and long-term recovery trends at 69 major stations in diverse Japanese cities using aggregated mobile phone data. We refer to this as “station area vitality”. We extend previous research by integrating external variables, such as land use and Points of Interest (POIs), to explain vitality drops and forecast recovery over two years. The findings reveal that multifunctional station areas—those combining leisure shopping, daily-needs shopping, and transport purposes—showed greater resilience during the pandemic. This underscores the value of mixed-use development and flexible zoning for enhancing station resilience. Furthermore, our forecasting models, particularly ARIMAX and LSTM, can to some degree predict long-term recovery trends during or after the pandemic when external variables and extended learning periods are included. We hence suggest that this can offer critical insights for urban planners and policymakers to build more resilient station areas and to forecast their performance during a new pandemic.