Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging technology for the future intelligent transportation systems (ITS). How to design an efficient routing protocol for VANET is a challenging task due to the high mobility and uneven distribution of vehicles in urban areas. This paper proposes a backbone-based approach to providing the optimal inner-street relaying strategy. The virtual backbone is created distributively in each road segment based on the newly introduced stability index, which considers the link stability between vehicles and the mobility of vehicles. We also deploy the roadside unit (RSU) at intersections to determine the next path for forwarding data. The RSU gathers a global view of backbone vehicles on each road connected to the junction and analyzes the performance of the backbone as a basis of routing path selection. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the conventional protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay.