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Grade separated bike lanes.

Most of them have no grade, and the ones that do are very low height. The safety feeling actually comes from sharing spaces, and not from being shielded - a result of road design, parking spaces and general city/street layout.

Sharing spaces works fine when speeds are low and streets are relatively narrow. It's still important to have physical separation for arterials, though.

I felt pretty unsafe when a van driver decided to share the bike path with me to make an illegal pass. I moved off the path over into the grass median and narrowly avoided getting hit head on.

Middle of the afternoon in a quiet village in the Netherlands. The cycling on the rest of the trip was pretty good though.

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