Winter Solstice Disco Dance Party Encourages Safety for Bicyclists

On the darkest day of the year, a disco dance party lit up one corner of downtown State College with the goal of creating awareness for bicyclist safety.

Local cyclists brought signs, lights, disco balls, music and dancing to Fraser Street to shed some light on cyclists sharing the road with vehicles.

‘One of the challenges with our roads is that mostly they are populated by cars that weigh 4,000 pounds and bicyclists don’t wear armor. We weigh basically body weight plus 20 pounds,’ said State College native Matt Brezina, who helped organize the event. ‘So it can be dangerous to bicycle when you don’t have protected bike lanes and things like that. We’re trying to create awareness for motorists and all people that there are bicycles on the road during this dark time of the year.’

Brezina grew up in State College and graduated from Penn State. A successful tech startup founder of companies like Sincerely and Xobni and an investor who now helps other startups get off the ground (he was an early investor in companies such as Dropbox and Ring), he currently makes his home in San Francisco, but is back in his hometown to spend the month of December with his family.

A bicycle and pedestrian safety advocate, Brezina is supportive of and stays connected with the entrepreneurial community in State College. Among other efforts, he is one of the creators of the Summer Founders Program, giving Penn State students $10,000 to spend the summer working in State College on their startup or nonprofit.

‘I’m very close to startup companies that are here, and through that I’ve also met a lot of people that also choose to bicycle as their mode of transportation,’ he said.

Scott Woods, founder of State College-based software development company West Arete, got in touch with Brezina to meet up and discuss making the local community safer for bicyclists.

While kicking around ideas over beers recently, Brezina told Woods he wanted to put together something to promote bicycling while he was in town. Together they came up with the idea for an outdoor disco dance party during the evening commute to ‘create awareness and bring light to the dark of the darkest day of the year.’

After the dance party, which utilized the new Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza, the group took a ride through surrounding neighborhoods.

‘It’s a fun way to bring the community together,’ Brezina said. ‘It’s nice to get a bunch of people out in a free environment. It’s a great community public space.’

Brezina said that despite the differences in scale, San Francisco and downtown State College have similarities when it comes to bicycling and walking. They also have advocacy groups working on behalf of bicyclists — Bicycle Coalition in San Francisco and CentreBike in State College, which promoted Thursday’s gathering.

‘The similarity, and the reason people love downtown State College, is because of the students we have a density of people living downtown with a walkable, bike-able environment,’ he said. ‘You don’t find that in a lot of our surrounding towns, like Altoona or Johnstown. In that way we have a similar kind of concentration of people that create a walkable, bike-able environment like San Francisco.’

Brezina is making a donation to CentreBike to help encourage similar events in the future.

It’s a cause that’s important to him, one he devotes much effort to and which is about much more than a preference for bicycling.

‘Our planet’s health depends on this,’ he said. ‘I am very concerned about what we’re doing to our planet, and I’m very concerned about our rising health costs and the challenges of obesity, and diabetes and all these other challenges. 

‘When you study places that enable people to safely travel by bicycle, the health outcomes, their carbon footprint, everything is better. It’s a real way I think I can help contribute to facing those challenges that I think are going to be our challenges for the next 100 years.’