In Release 14, 3GPP introduced a novel paradigm known as cellular vehicle--to--everything (C-V2X) \emph{mode-4} to specifically support vehicular communications in scenarios without network coverage. Such a scheme has been devised to operate distributedly harnessing a sensing mechanism whereby vehicles can monitor the received power across subchannels. Based on the measured power intensities, vehicles autonomously select a suitable subchannel over which safety messages are broadcasted. The selected subchannel is utilized by the vehicle for a short period of time before releasing it to select another subchannel. In this work, we propose a scheduling approach based on the aforementioned technology. We assume the existence of a primary sub-band that supports semi-persistently reserved subchannels (as specified by 3GPP). In addition, we also consider that there exist auxiliary sub-bands that convey random re-transmissions in order to improve reception reliability. Different configurations of the proposed approach are explored and their performance are assessed using real vehicular traces.