free way to ride! I voted for 4 although I appreciate the logic of aiming for the skies. But realistically, from a rural perspective, the rural roads are our cycling facilities (and if they're quiet enough they're really good, whereas most of the separated lanes run alongside major A roads and aren't all that pleasant). Good signposting, allowing cyclists to avoid the dual carriageways and take the quiet back routes, would make the most difference and it's cheap too. Of course I'm fortunate in living in an area (Southwest Scotland) with lots of tiny single track roads where there are barely any cars. And I do find that once I get into town, then it's even more important to have good segregation because it's quite hard to change mental gears into riding among proper traffic again. I voted 3. Demanding complete segregation is waste of time -- it is not achieveable and it simply makes you look like an extremist. In fact the Netherlands, which we hold out as the example to emulate, has only about 20,000km of cycle path to about 140,000km of roads, so quite evidently the majority of cycling route must be on-road. Point is of course that all roads which are really not possible to make cycle-safe have segregated paths, the rest are calmed, speed-limited and generally quite well-designed for cyclists needs. I believe we need complete segregation on roads where the speed limits are in excess of 40 mph, and preferably 30 mph. Why? Look