In an urban environment, intersections are critical locations in terms of road crashes and number of killed or injured people. Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can help reduce the traffic collisions at intersections by sending warning messages to the vehicles. However, the performance of VANETs should be enhanced to guarantee delivery of the messages, particularly safety messages to the destination. Data congestion control is an efficient way to decrease packet loss and delay and increase the reliability of VANETs. In this paper, a centralized and localized data congestion control strategy is proposed to control data congestion using roadside units (RSUs) at intersections. The proposed strategy consists of three units for detecting congestion, clustering messages, and controlling data congestion. In this strategy, the channel usage level is measured to detect data congestion in the channels. The messages are gathered, filtered, and then clustered by machine learning algorithms. K-means algorithm clusters the messages based on message size, validity of messages, and type of messages. The data congestion control unit determines appropriate values of transmission range and rate, contention window size, and arbitration interframe spacing for each cluster. Finally, RSUs at the intersections send the determined communication parameters to the vehicles stopped before the red traffic lights to reduce communication collisions. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the delay, throughput, and packet loss ratio in comparison with other congestion control strategies using the proposed congestion control strategy