2. These systems are primarily for avoiding car-on-car collisions. They're very good at that. Which is maybe why it's not mentioned in the article...
But I think it's reasonable to expect pedestrians to take at least some responsibility for keeping safe. I'm primarily a pedestrian. I'll sometimes be doing something on my phone while walking on a sidewalk (though I try to keep even that to a minimum), but as soon as I'm about to step off a curb into the street, the phone goes away. I watch where I'm going, and where the cars around me are going, for however long I'm in the street.
I see plenty of people who are still buried in their phones while crossing the street, and it's just stupid. If they get hit and die while crossing the street, it's (probably) not their fault, but that's little consolation: they're still dead. If they could have prevented that by taking the entirely reasonable step of making sure they're aware of their surroundings, isn't it worth it? I'm talking about outcomes here, not responsibility. If you can do something to keep yourself safer, and that thing is an entirely reasonable, non-burdensome thing to do, then you should probably do it, no?
And that's what the parent's post was about, anyway: no one is talking about responsibility. It seems pretty likely to me that at least some of the increased rate of pedestrian-involved accidents can be attributed to increased pedestrian inattention.
Given the volume of people walking around in NYC at most hours of the day, I'd expect a sort of "herd immunity" to come into play: sure, you might be on your phone, but you're surrounded by 15 other people while crossing the street, and a car is going to be hard pressed to not see all of you. At least one of those people is likely paying attention, at any rate.
Also I was a little confused by their conclusion, given this statistic in the linked report, under "Pedestrian Self-Reports of Distraction":
"Using emergency room data from 1,075 pedestrian injuries (2008–2011), researchers at Bellevue Hospital found that 7.7% of admitted pedestrians were using an electronic device at the time of the crash."
How is 7.7% not "significant"? I'm sure those 83 people would rather not have been in the emergency room, and maybe have changed their behavior for the better. And that's just injuries; obviously dead pedestrians can't self-report what they were up to in the moments leading up to their death. Also consider that 7.7% is a lower bound. While it's unlikely that someone would lie to say they were using a device when they weren't, it's likely that there are quite a few people who were actually using a device during the incident but didn't want to admit it out of embarrassment or fear of fault or blame being assigned to them (legally, even).
I just don't find this study all that compelling.
Your experience is anecdata. Just look at hard numbers.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you're not a huge dumbass if you do it with no regard to common sense.
It's a thinkable scenario. Has this ever happened though?
Normally it eats up some percentage of the naively expected security gain, but my question is if it's ever > 100%?