The BL design in Al's post is a fine example of an incompetent city planner. If, indeed, such a person designed this nightmare.

That's one of the basic problems with BLs. In many cases the people that design these things are not cyclists, have no cycling experience, and think they're helping by SWAGging it and coming up with some of the worst and most dangerous designs.

How to handle a bad design like this? I would negotiate my way into the traffic lane to proceed straight. The heavier the traffic, the earlier I would move over. If it were my first time on this route and this caught me by surprise, I would go with the turn, then turn around and come back in the direction I wanted to go.

Later I would contact the city planner's office about how to correct their mistake.