Traffic management and on-road safety have been a concern for the transportation authorities and the engineering communities for many years. Most of the implemented technologies for intelligent highways focus on safety measures and increased driver awareness, and expect a centralized management for the traffic flow. Leveraging recent advances in wireless communication, researchers have proposed solutions based vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-road-side communication in order to detect traffic jams and better disseminate data from on-road sensors. However, no autonomous and adaptive traffic management solution has been proposed. In addition, car manufacturers have been very slow and reluctant in adopting vehicular networking (VANET) standards. In this talk, we articulate a new vision for inter-vehicle communication and assessment of road condition, and promote a novel system for traffic management. Vehicle to on-road sensors as well as inter-vehicle connectivity will be enabled through the use of hand-held devices such as smart phones. This not only enables real-time data sharing but also expedites the integration of VANET technology without awaiting the endorsement of the car manufacturers. The proposed traffic management system incorporates computation and communication capabilities in traffic lights, and accounts for the human-factor in controlling the traffic flow. Smart road reconfiguration capabilities, e.g., changing lane direction, traffic light timing, etc., will be exploited to improve traffic flow and adapt to unexpected incidents. The goal is to allow autonomous and driver-centric routing decisions that not only are locally optimal but also serves an overall system objective. Results of some of our on-going work is also presented.