Remembering Matt Glover: It's not just about naming a bike path

UPDATE: The House Rules Committee finally agreed Wednesday afternoon to allow a floor vote on the bill to name the bike trail after the late Matt Glover. The first vote is scheduled Thursday.

Matt Glover, 48, traveled more than 5,000 miles a year by bicycle, rising every morning at 4 a.m. and commuting winter and summer from North Pole to Fairbanks along the shoulder of the Richardson Highway. He worked as a locomotive engineer for the Alaska Railroad.

“He was very conscientious of being visible on his bike with reflective clothing and lights,” Arleen Glover, his mother, wrote to Alaska legislators. “But with all that, he wasn’t safe.”

A 2015 GMC Sierra pickup driven by Fred Aker, 66, hit him on October 13, 2022 at the Badger Road on-ramp to the Richardson Highway. Glover died from complications five weeks later.

A bill to name the new bike trail from Airport Way to Badger Road in his honor sailed through the Senate on February 5 with no opposition.

Senate Bill 129, sponsored by Sen. Robert Myers, would be a fitting tribute and a “sad reminder to all of us, drivers and cyclists alike, to be extra careful when bicycles are around motor vehicles,” Campbell Webb of North Pole testified.

The measure should have been signed into law by now, but for almost three months it has been stuck in the House Rules Committee, the fiefdom of Rep. Craig Johnson, the guy who failed to follow the law on his financial disclosure form for years, claiming he didn’t know how much money his wife made as she wouldn’t tell him.

The decent thing would be to enact SB 129 to create the Matt Glover bike path.

But that’s not all that needs to happen.

The Fairbanks Police Department needs to open an investigation into Glover’s death and explain the inadequate response by local police.

The police concluded it was an “accident” based on assumptions, some of which are open to question, including the speed of the motor vehicle, stopping distance and just how visible Glover was that day.

I recommend that you read what veteran Alaska reporter Craig Medred found when he investigated this for his blog. I think his reporting makes it clear that the review was cursory, at best, and that there was a rush to judgement.

One big open question is the timing of the toxicology report on the motorist, which found a small amount of oxycodone in his system, and the interpretation by Fairbanks police of the results. The case was closed with no charges.

Medred obtained police reports that said Glover “appeared out of nowhere” before the truck hit him at 5:34 a.m.

“I found the bicycle had no light attached either to the front or the rear,” Detective Ace Adams wrote in his report. “I did see what appeared to be a mountain bracket for a light on the back rack of the bicycle, but no light was on the bicycle or at the scene.”

Adams said he looked at the “initial responding officers’ body camera footage. I noted the footage appears to show the bicyclist had been wearing a green safety vest and and orange sweatshirt at the time of the incident. This would be consistent with the green and orange fibers seen along the side of the roadway.”

Medred said there was no hint of how much time the police spent looking for a light or if a light was on Glover’s clothing.

Medred wrote there was no “indication FPD asked his wife what he was wearing when he left home in the morning and what lights he had mounted to his bike. These are important details.”

Responding to Medred’s reporting, Glover’s widow said that the headlight was returned to her by Fairbanks police.

“I plan to ask FPD how officers collected a light at the scene of the collision, gave it to Mr. Glover’s widow as Mr. Glover’s light, and somehow failed to note this in an investigation suggesting he was on an unlighted vehicle,” Medred wrote.

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