As you said traffic lights in Europe are on the leading edge of an intersection. This may in fact be the simplest and most foundational bit of usability and user experience innovation the US could learn from Europe in intersection design.
1) Placing the signals on the leading edge means that the stop line is ~10 feet back from the intersection. If you decide to ignore the stop line, you can't see the signals. BAM instant conformance to proper road use.
2) Following on that, sitting 10 feet back from the intersection you can see everything in the intersection. You can see pedestrians crossing in front of you and to the right of you. You can see cyclists entering into the intersection and passing you far before you enter the intersection. As a ped or cyclist this makes intersections much, much safer.
3) As you approach an intersection, and the light switches to yellow and then red, there can be no doubt about the state of the light as you enter the intersection. You can't enter or pass through the intersection on a red light as you might in the US, because it will be red before you even get to the intersection. This seriously reduces running lights or flying through the intersection, making intersections much, much safter for motorists.
This is not the case in most of England, also in France there is often another set of lights lower down on the pole positioned for the driver in the car in the front of the queue.
It has three lights, only two of them positioned at the stop line.
In any case, placing them only on the near side is often intentional, as it forces drivers to stop far away from the intersection itself. This leaves space for pedestrians, and provides drivers from the other directions with more space to look around. It also creates a buffer where cars can move into when an emergency vehicle needs to pass the queues.
Of course, I learned my lesson and don't expect the system to adapt to me.
Now when I go back after driving in the US for 20 years there are a lot of things that seem weird in Germany. Not having right-on-red (and even left on red into one-ways) is a huge plus here. I also think there's too much yielding to the car coming from much smaller streets on the right.
That's a feature though, since it is usually used in residential areas to slow down traffic and force people to stop more frequently, instead of just rolling through at 30...who are we kidding, 40+ Km/h.