—The wide scale deployment of cooperative vehicular ad-hoc networks will require the design of efficient congestion control policies that guarantee stable and reliable communications between vehicles and with infrastructure nodes. These policies should reduce the load on the communications channel, while satisfying the strict application’s reliability requirements. To this aim, this letter proposes and evaluates a contextual cooperative congestion control policy that exploits the traffic context information of each vehicle to reduce the channel load, while satisfying the vehicular applications requirements.