The invention provides a system which can select a less crowded road as a road section of a guidance route. The vehicle navigation system executes a route search from a departing point or the present position of the vehicle to the destination and provides guidance for the guidance route, taking into account whether a road is in a city area or a suburban area. The vehicle navigation system includes an information memory for storing map information for each road section, a route search routine for searching for a route from the present position to the destination based on map information stored in the information memory, and a decision routine for determining whether a road to be searched is in a city area or in a suburban area, and wherein the route search searches for a route by weighting the roads which are determined to be in the city area in order to give a lower preference thereto.