Inequality of Access to Fire Services: An Analysis of Disparity in Response Time in West Bandung Regency

Fire services are a basic public service whose value depends on how quickly crews reach an incident, yet most studies of fire station planning focus on urban settings and give less attention to regencies that combine dense urban corridors with hilly rural areas. This study examines how response-time disparities reflect unequal access to fire services between urban and rural areas of West Bandung Regency, which factors explain them, and what they imply for equitable basic service policy. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was used. Quantitative data comprised 1,247 fire incident records from 2022 to 2024, analysed through descriptive statistics, difference tests, correlation, response-time decomposition, and geographic information system network analysis. Qualitative data came from interviews and observation. Mean response time was 13.2 minutes in urban areas and 23.8 minutes in rural areas, and 77.5% and 16.8% of incidents met the fifteen-minute standard. Travel time accounted for 9.3 of the 10.6-minute gap. Only four serviceable fire trucks, concentrated in three service points, were available, and fifteen-minute coverage was estimated at 55.2% of residents. The novelty of this study lies in separating facility presence, spatial coverage, and actual performance, showing that the administrative presence of fire posts does not guarantee effective access.