Alan Gore lives on Verde Valley School Road in the Village of Oak Creek. Three nights per week, he and his wife go to bed early so they can get up and drive to his wife’s dialysis appointment in Cottonwood first thing in the morning. 

Occasionally, he said, the silence of these nights is interrupted by “loud engines roaring,” which wake the couple up.

“It’s loud enough to shake the windows in some cases,” he said. 

Gore isn’t certain whether cars or motorcycles are the main culprits for the intrusive engine noises he hears at night, but “every two or three days we hear at least one of them,” he said. 

Gore isn’t the only resident who has voiced concerns about loud vehicles.

“I get a lot of complaints about supposedly excessive noise coming from cars [in VOC],” a Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office spokesman said.

Discussions with law enforcement and VOC residents finds competing theories about the cause of the excessive engine noise. 
On social media, residents have discussed rumors that vehicles are using Verde Valley School Road and Jacks Canyon Road — on the other side of 179 — to race each other or accelerate to extreme speeds, generating excessive noise. Both roads have relatively long, open stretches where vehicles have time to accelerate.

But county officials said they haven’t seen hard evidence of racing or extreme speeds in the area. 

“I don’t know of … any indications — tire marks, peel out marks, anything like that — anywhere in the Village of Oak Creek … of drag racing or something like that,” the Yavapai Sheriff’s spokesman said. 

Dwight D’Evelyn, public affairs coordinator for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, said that patrol logs from the VOC in the last six weeks contain only a few speed warnings for single vehicle traffic. 

“We have no specific information on road racing on Verde Valley School Road,” D’Evelyn said. “We’d sure like to know from folks what it is they’re hearing or seeing, so we can address it.” 

There was, however, an Aug. 22 hit-an-run accident on the “Y” roundabout in Sedona that, according to varying witness accounts, may have involved a motorcycle either racing or attempting to pass the car on the right. The driver of the motorcycle in that case, who was airlifted to Flagstaff Medical Center, was a resident of VOC. 

Yavapai County District 3 Supervisor Randy Garrison said in addition to using law enforcement officers, the county monitors traffic count and speed in the VOC using two radar speed signs, and, to his knowledge, these have not indicated any unusual traffic activity involving speed. 

“The sheriff’s department is definitely watching speed,” he said. “[The radar sign] logs that in, time and speed, so we can keep a pretty good, accurate representation of what’s happening on that road, and when we see an issue happening consistently, then we move our officers around to accommodate enforcement of that. 

“I have yet to hear of an issue,” he added. “People are watching those. If there was one I’m sure I would’ve heard about it by now.” 

The local YCSO spokesman suggested that if residents believe there is racing or speeding in the VOC, one way they could address the issue would be to keep records of the times that they hear them. 

“That possibly could help us during the night,” he said. “If we can show a pattern that, between 11 o’clock and 12:30 at night, there’s ‘x’ amount of cars with loud exhaust or loud music playing, then we could try to have an officer in that area, but we have to show a pattern.”

But correcting the problem with additional patrols assumes that the vehicles generating the noise are in violation of current regulations regarding speed or muffler equipment.