In this paper, I propose an application layer cooperative congestion control scheme for safety message broadcast in vehicular networks, called CMS, that adaptively controls a vehicle’s safety message rate and transmit timing based on the channel congestion state. Motivated by the fact that all vehicles should transmit and receive an application layer safety message in a periodic manner, I directly exploit the message itself as a means of estimating the channel congestion state. In particular, vehicles can determine wider network conditions by appending their local channel estimation result onto safety message transmissions and sharing them with each other. In result CMS realizes cooperative congestion control without any modification of the existing MAC protocol. I present extensive NS-3 simulation results which show that CMS outperforms conventional congestion control schemes in terms of the packet collision rate and throughput, especially in a high-density traffic environment.