Centralized solutions for vehicular traffic re-routing to alleviate congestion suffer from two intrinsic problems: scalability, as the central server has to perform intensive computation and communication with the vehicles in real-time; and privacy, as the drivers have to share their location as well as the origins and destinations of their trips with the server. This article proposes DIVERT, a distributed vehicular re-routing system for congestion avoidance. DIVERT offloads a large part of the rerouting computation at the vehicles, and thus, the re-routing process becomes practical in real-time. To take collaborative rerouting decisions, the vehicles exchange messages over vehicular ad hoc networks. DIVERT is a hybrid system because it still uses a server and Internet communication to determine an accurate global view of the traffic. In addition, DIVERT balances the user privacy with the re-routing effectiveness. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with a centralized system, the proposed hybrid system increases the user privacy by 92% on average. In terms of average travel time, DIVERT’s performance is slightly less than that of the centralized system, but it still achieves substantial gains compared to the no re-routing case. In addition, DIVERT reduces the CPU and network load on the server by 99.99% and 95%, respectively