as recounted in the OP. It is hoped that if the net doesn't deter them to begin with, it may give them an opportunity to change their mind, as you suggested. But you're right, a determined person could simply crawl to the edge of the net and jump from there.
It's impossible to know how many people have jumped from the bridge, but I hope to hear about people who changed their mind and were rescued from the net.
There's an excellent, albeit disturbing, documentary about the bridge's history with suicide:
The Bridge is a 2006 documentary film by Eric Steel spanning one year of filming at the Golden Gate Bridge which crosses the Golden Gate entrance to San Francisco Bay, connecting the city of San Francisco, California to the Marin Headlands of Marin County, in 2004. The film shows a number of suicides, and features interviews with family and friends of some of the identified people who had thrown themselves from the bridge that year and one person who had jumped previously and survived.
The film was inspired by a 2003 article titled "Jumpers", written by Tad Friend for The New Yorker magazine. The film crew shot almost 10,000 hours of footage, recording 23 of the known 24 suicides off the bridge in 2004.
Wikipedia article about the film
The full documentary The Bridge (2006) free from The Internet Archive
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