Medium access control protocols should manage the highly dynamic nature of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) and the variety of application requirements. Therefore, achieving a well-designed MAC protocol in VANETs is a challenging issue. The contention window is a critical element for handling medium access collisions in IEEE 802.11, and it highly affects the communications performance. This paper proposes a new contention window control scheme, called DBM-ACW, for VANET environments. Analysis and simulation results using OMNeT++ in urban scenarios show that DBM-ACW provides better overall performance compared with previous proposals, even with high network densities.