Cooperative traffic safety applications such as lane change or overtaking assistance have the potential to reduce the number of road fatalities. Many emerging traffic safety applications are based on IEEE 802.11p and periodic position messages, so-called cooperative awareness messages (CAM) being broadcasted by all vehicles. In Europe, ETSI defines a periodic report rate of 2 Hz for CAMs. Although a high report rate is the key to early hazard detection, the 2 Hz rate has been chosen to avoid congestion in settings where the vehicle density is high, e.g., on major highways and in urban scenarios. However, on rural roads with a limited number of communicating vehicles, a report rate of 2 Hz leads to unnecessary delay in cooperative awareness. By adapting the CAM report rate depending on the specific application and road traffic density, and by making use of the priority levels provided by the 802.11p quality of service mechanism, we show that hazards can be detected earlier and the available bandwidth is used more efficiently, while not overexploiting the network resources. / <p>©2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.</p><p></p><p>Category number CFP11VTF-ART; Code 87844</p>