Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) are being advocated as a means to increase road safety and driving comfort, as well as to facilitate traffic control.Road congestion and traffic-related pollution have a large negative social and economic impact on several economies worldwide. Due to the high dynamic nature of the network topology in VANETs, finding and maintaining the routes for data forwarding is still more challenging. In this paper, we propose a urban traffic control aware routing protocol for VANETs that is called UTCARP. It considers two modules of (i) the traffic control aware selection of vertices through which a packet is passed toward its destination and (ii) the greedy forwarding strategy by which a packet is forwarded between two adjacent vertices. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed approach outperforms conventional protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and routing overhead.