Stay Behavior and Spatial Use Patterns in Transit-Integrated Commercial Spaces: Field Observation Evidence from Chinese and Japanese Rail Station Areas

Commercial spaces integrated with rail transit stations serve not only as transfer interfaces but also as important places for consumption, resting, meeting, social interaction and everyday public life in high-density cities. Existing studies have mainly focused on transfer efficiency, commercial development intensity and pedestrian accessibility, while paying insufficient attention to how passing pedestrian flows are transformed into staying activities in transit-integrated commercial spaces. This paper examines the relationship between stay behavior and spatial use patterns in rail-transit commercial circulation spaces. Representative cases from Shanghai, Tokyo and Nagoya are selected for field observation, behavioral counting, questionnaire survey and spatial module analysis. The focus of this paper is to improve the quality of Transit-Integrated Commercial Spaces through analysis based on user stay behavior. The study categorizes the key influencing factors into three groups: C1 public transport connection, C2 place composition and C3 spatial configuration. Observation indicators include instantaneous pedestrian flow, passing flow, number of staying users, stay ratio, spatial legibility and willingness to rest and interact. The results show that the difference between Chinese and Japanese cases in spatial legibility is limited: 65% of respondents in Shanghai and 68% of respondents in Japan reported high legibility of the connection spaces. However, a significant difference was found in willingness to stay: 82% of Japanese respondents expressed willingness to stay, rest or interact in the connection spaces, compared with only 24% of Shanghai respondents. This finding suggests that spatial legibility does not automatically generate stay behavior. The key issue in transit-integrated commercial spaces is not only whether users can understand the route and move efficiently, but whether the space provides resting facilities, public interfaces, appropriate node scales and continuous commercial frontages that can transform passing flows into staying, resting, interacting and consuming activities. The paper argues that the design of rail-transit commercial circulation spaces should shift from a single transfer-efficiency orientation to a composite orientation of efficiency, staying and place experience, thereby enhancing the publicness and spatial performance of station-city integrated commercial spaces.