ECF's Velo-city conference is certainly the biggest of its kind, but that does not mean other cycling-related events are not worth alook. One of them is the International Cycling History Conference (ICHC), the 24th edition of  which took place in Lisbon from May 15 to 17 of this year.

Jens Erik Larsen of De Frie Fugle environmental consultancy from Denmark attended the conference. "Being involved in VeloCity conferences since the very beginning in Bremen 1980, I was a bit surprised to hear about a parallel serial of conferences," he says.

The conference took place in Palácio Foz, the national museum of sports, and included an exhibition of old bikes and other memorabilia.

"The participants sometimes had incredibly detailed knowledge about bicycles, including which factory had produced which spare parts for which kind of bikes for example," Jens-Erik Larsen remembers.

He himself presented a paper about a main street of Copenhagen, Nørrebrogade, which is the street with the most daily cyclists worldwide today. But already from the 1930s to 1950s, between 30,000 and 40,000 cyclists used the street everyday. Then, however, came the car boom and cyclists' numbers declined before Nørrebrogade found back its former cycling glory in recent years.

Other participants talked about topics as diverse as cycling at the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968, women in cycling or the bicycle culture in Bogotá.

The 2014 International Cycling History Conference will take place in Baltimore, USA. Jens Erik Larsen highly recommends attending. "There is so much to be learned from history," he says. "Nørrebrogade is one of the best examples. Now we are doing again what we already did during the 1930s.  Had we looked back a little earlier, everything could have been a lot easier."

More info about the ICHC: http://www.cycling-history.org/