Road traffic management experts are constantly striving to develop, implement, and test a number of novel strategies to reduce traffic congestion impact on the economy, society, and the environment. Despite their efforts, these strategies are still inefficient and a call for advanced multidisciplinary approaches is needed. We, therefore, introduce in this paper an original traffic congestion mitigation strategy inspired by a well-known technology in wireless communications, i.e. cognitive radio technology. Our strategy exploits Connected Vehicles technology along with the often under-utilized reserved lanes, such as bus and carpool lanes, to virtually inflate the road network capacity to ease traffic congestion situations. Two variants of our strategy have been evaluated using simulation and the obtained results are very promising in terms of the achieved reduction in average travel time for different vehicle classes including buses as well.