There's a few intersections like that here in Dublin.
But they aren't marked. So what sometimes happens is I cruise up on a bike, in the middle of the road because none of those have bike lanes.. and the bike, naturally, never triggers the lights. Neither does the car behind me.
Sorry to hear it's not only a problem here in the U.S. Ideally, our intersection wouldn't have dedicated left turn arrows at all, since it doesn't need them most of the day. The problem arises only about four hours a day. At those times the otherwise empty thoroughfare turns into a wave of cars making it impossible to enter or leave our neighborhood street by turning left because there's rarely a large enough gap in the fast-flowing traffic.
Traffic engineers probably have a term for this kind of bi-polar intersection. A solution would be some kind of "conditional left arrow" but there's no such thing (at least here in the U.S.) If there's a dedicated green arrow for left turn, then there's a modal left-turn red arrow along with it. It should be possible to improve all scenarios by standardizing something like a flashing yellow arrow to mean "okay to cross if no oncoming traffic" since this already works as the default behavior at intersections with no lights or lights with no left turn arrows.
> flashing yellow arrow to mean "okay to cross if no oncoming traffic"
That's already a thing, unless I'm misunderstanding you. We've had flashing yellow left turn arrows for years. I'm in the PNW, but I've seen it in other places in the US, we're definitely not unique.
But they aren't marked. So what sometimes happens is I cruise up on a bike, in the middle of the road because none of those have bike lanes.. and the bike, naturally, never triggers the lights. Neither does the car behind me.