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Recently, Routing in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) has found significant attention due to its unique characteristics such as lack of energy constraints and high-speed vehicles. In addition, since VANET networks are highly dynamic, design of routing algorithms suitable for an urban environment could be extremely challenging. Appropriate algorithms for urban environments should be opportunistic routing (OR) algorithms in which traffic transmission is performed using the store-carry-forward mechanism. Most of the OR algorithms use the flooding mechanism for increasing delivery ratio without considering the overheads of flooding. In this paper, a new algorithm called Reliability-aware Location and History based Opportunistic Routing (RLHOR) is proposed to reduce overhead of message replication . The RLHOR searches for the most reliable route by evaluating the reliability of intermediate links considering their lifetimes, location and direction of intermediate vehicles, and the history of message delivery by intermediate vehicles. Using the ONE simulator, our performance evaluation results show that the RLHOR can operate better than other conventional OR algorithms under different network scenarios. Under sparse networks, the RLHOR not only increases delivery ratio, but also reduces overhead and traffic loss.