To alleviate possible traffic congestion during rush hours, an improved traffic rerouting strategy designed for (or interplayed with) the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is proposed in this paper. The proposed strategy considers not only the real-time traffic information but also the maximization of road utilization to reach an optimized solution. Furthermore, an alternative path selection is incorporated so that an efficient rerouting path is determined according to the destination of the vehicle, the density and the capacity of the road, and the speed. Via simulations, we can successfully show that our proposed strategy significantly outperforms the closely related strategies in the literature in terms of the travel time, CO$_{2}$ emission, and fuel consumption, in particular, when heavy traffic is involved. Specifically, our proposed strategy can gain up to 20% of reduction in the average travel time in a realistic scenario to be observed later. Additionally, our proposed strategy gains 19% at least of improvement in the case with different road networks and 28.6% at least of improvement in the case with different percentages of reduction of traffic lights as compared to the closely related strategies as shown in the Appendices given in the supplementary downloadable material.