Recent advances in wireless inter-vehicle communication systems enable the establishment of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) and create significant opportunities for the deployment of a wide variety of applications and services to vehicles. In this work, we investigate the problem of developing services that can provide car drivers with time-sensitive information about traffic conditions and roadside facilities. We introduce the Vehicular Information Transfer Protocol (VITP), a locationaware, application-layer, communication protocol designed to support a distributed service infrastructure over Vehicular Adhoc Networks. We describe the key design concepts of the VITP protocol and infrastructure. We provide an extensive simulation study of VITP performance on large-scale vehicular networks under realistic highway and city traffic conditions. Our results demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of VITP in providing location-aware services over VANETs.