Accessibility analysis of urban fire stations within communities: a fine-scale perspective

In recent years, with the rapid expansion of urban space and the explosion of population within communities in China, fire stations face challenges in providing timely response to potential demands throughout their service coverage. To ensure speedy and equitable provision of fire services, it is essential to evaluate the accessibility of fire stations under the current fire service systems. Traditional accessibility analysis is often based on the aggregated large areal units, such as the census tracks, failing to assess accessibility of individual buildings. In this regard, this study seeks to analyze potential accessibility to urban fire stations at a fine scale, i.e., the building level, and to provide valuable information to assist in strategic planning of fire stations in urban areas and within local communities. Because the detailed intra-community roads are not stored in the official city map database, we propose to use a classic GIS technology, the Delaunay triangulation model, to automatically extract the intra-community roads from building footprints. With these private roads integrated into the existing city roads, a simulated road network is constructed. Then, the Voronoi-based method and buffering method are used to assess accessibility to urban fire stations. Results reveal that the current layout of fire stations in the study area is not sufficient to achieve a complete coverage of potential demands in the stipulated time, and the traditional central areas enjoy better access to fire services compared to the periphery areas. The building-level analyses will not only enable decision-makers to strategically allocate new fire stations in the urban areas, but also help local authorities to enhance fire safety management within the community. The proposed method can also be applied to fine-scale analysis of neighborhood services’ accessibility in other cities.