Road safety is an active area of research for the automotive industry, and certainly one of ongoing interest to governments around the world. The intelligent transportation system (ITS) is one of several viable solutions with which to improve road safety, where the communication medium (e.g., among vehicles and between vehicles and the other components in an ITS environment, such as roadside infrastructure) is typically wireless. A typical communication standard adopted by car manufacturers is IEEE 802.11p for communications. Thus, this paper presents an overview of IEEE 802.11p, with a particular focus on its adoption in an ITS setting. Specifically, we analyze both MAC and PHY layers in a dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) environment.