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This work is devoted to solving the problem of multi-criteria multi-hop routing in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), aiming at three goals, increasing the end-to-end delivery ratio, reducing the end-to-end latency, and minimizing the network overhead. To this end and beyond the state-of-the-art, HEuristic ROuting for Vehicular Networks (HERO), which is a distributed routing protocol for urban environments, encapsulating two main components, is proposed. The first component, road-segment selection, aims to prioritize the road segments based on a heuristic function that contains two probability distributions, namely, shortest distance distribution (SDD) and connectivity distribution (CD). The mass function of SDD is the product of three quantities, the perpendicular distance, the dot-production angle, and the segment length. On the other hand, the mass function of CD considers two quantities, the density of vehicles and the inter-distance of vehicles on the road segment. The second component, vehicle selection, aims to prioritize the vehicles on the road segment based on four quantities, the relative speed, the movement direction, the available buffer size, and the signal fading. The simulation results showed that HERO achieved a promising performance in terms of delivery success ratio, delivery delay, and communication overhead.