In order to improve the transmission efficiency of information between vehicles in the city and realize the information sharing between vehicles, aiming at the problem that the current multi-hop unicast routing algorithm based on geographical location forwarding in the Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork （VANET） does not consider the specificity of the urban scene and cannot adapt to the high dynamicity of vehicles in the city, so that the data packets between vehicles may spread on the wrong path, resulting in high packet loss rate and long delay, a new greedy routing algorithm based on path exploration was proposed. Firstly, taken the data packet transmission delay as the standard, artificial bee colony algorithm was used to explore multiple routing paths planned by the digital map. Then, the multi-hop forwarding method of data packets between vehicles was optimized. Simulation results show that, compared with Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol and Maxduration-Minangle GPSR (MM-GPSR) improved algorithm, in the best case, the data packet arrival rate of the proposed algorithm increases by 13.81% and 9.64% respectively, and the average data packet end-to-end delay of the proposed algorithm decreases by 61.91% and 27.28% respectively.