In this paper, we introduce Receiver as prOXY (ROXY) VANET routing protocol to overcome many limitations of other VANET routing protocols introduced in the literature. ROXY employs a geographic routing scheme with opportunistic next hop selection, to increase the overall VANET networks throughput. Its main objective is to solve the increasing congestion and collisions in heavy loaded network traffic. The large improvement introduced by ROXY is caused by tackling three issues. Firstly, it utilizes the spatial resources by using two directed antennas on each vehicle, one on the front side, and one on the back side. Secondly, ROXY is a distributed routing algorithm, where the decision of next relay selection does not need a communication with a central entity. Lastly, ROXY reduces the transmission delay by using the new “Denial of Transmission, with Collision Prevention” multiple access protocol, which takes advantage of the directed antennas and the street topology in urban areas. Simulation results show the ability of ROXY to introduce large improvements in reducing the collisions and increasing the throughput compared to other routing protocols. For example, when compared to one beacon-free protocol in the literature, ROXY succeeded to deliver 3 times the number of IP packets in one scenario, compared to the other protocol.