What does this mean?

In my neighborhood there’s one at a two lane road but the street itself is very wide so people generally drive very fast to begin with and are often distracted.

Lots of conflict at that crossing even with LED flashers. I don’t know what to do to make drivers pay attention to the strip of road right in front of them.

If you are going to pay presumably a lot more money for all of the extra detectors and electronics then they need to deliver 2 things as mentioned by OP: 1) They make sure that anyone on the crossing has time to cross rather than stopping traffic for a fixed amount of time (useful outside schools) and 2) If there aren't any people crossing, the traffic should be stopped for a short amount of time no worse than if they were just a normal Pelican crossing.

However.

Even when no-one is crossing or in some case someone crossed and is about 50 metres up the road, the crossings are still usually on red for a total of often 20 seconds, which is way longer than most Pelican crossings that are on red for usually 5 to 10 seconds max.

I don't know if no-one notices or cares but it is really annoying!

Thanks for the project write up and shaking up the Halloween costume mix a little.