One of the major challenges for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is related to efficient location management issue. In this paper, we propose a new region-based location service management protocol (RLSMP) that uses mobility patterns as means to synthesize vehicle movement and thus can be used in VANETs applications. One of the key distinguishing features of our solution from existing literature is its scalability since it uses message aggregation in both updating and querying, and promises locality awareness as well as minimum signaling overhead. To evaluate the efficiency of our proposal, we compare our scheme with existing solutions using both analytical and simulation approaches. To achieve this, we develop analytical models to evaluate the location updates cost. Numerical and simulation results show that our protocol scales better than existing schemes, when increasing the size of VANET which enhances the feasibility of such large scale ad hoc networks.