Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are mobile networks with highly dynamic contexts of operation. The design and application of context-aware systems could be critical to enhance the performance of protocols deployed in VANETs, which depend on both network and traffic conditions, to detect hostile communication environments, as well as to offer a novel way to make decisions in real-time. In this paper, we present a baseline study for the design of a context-aware system for dissemination of safety messages in VANETs. We model a realistic vehicular intersection and perform extensive simulations to evaluate two well-known dissemination mechanisms, namely the Slotted 1-persistence and the Traffic Adaptive Data Dissemination (TrAD) Protocol, with a set of parameters according to different operation scenarios. We show how the dissemination mechanisms’ performance could be improved, or worsened, by choosing a different set of parameter values. By characterizing the operation scenarios, it is possible to adequate the parameters of the dissemination mechanism with the values that work best in a given context, improving in this way the general performance of the dissemination mechanisms under study.