This paper investigates the politics of urban mobility and infrastructure in post-1970s Cairo. It takes the case of the Greater Cairo Ring Road, constructed during Egypt’s moment of economic liberalization beginning in 1974 (Infitah). The Ring Road was planned to alleviate urban crowdedness, accelerate desert development, and contain urban encroachment on the Nile Delta’s dwindling fertile land. Yet, it facilitated an unprecedented erosion of land fit for agriculture and led to the emergence of Cairo’s peri-urban belt and border: the spatially and geographically peripheral rural-urban communities that surround the city and supply the majority of its waged labor. Thus, as it transformed mobility in the city, it also transformed its geographical, social, and ecological parameters. In this paper, I ask two interrelated questions. Firstly, how did the Ring Road reconfigure relations of mobility and space in Cairo and its peripheries? Secondly, how are uneven relations of mobility (of power) expressed in, and negotiated through, the urban geography of the Ring Road? I draw on policy documents, press archives, and interviews with urban planners, officials, and private developers to construct a political and urban history of the Ring Road. By studying how planning and constructing the Road articulated and re-configured relations of space, capital, and coercion in Cairo and its peripheries, I analyze how and why mobility in the city was planned and for whom. I am specifically interested in how mobility functions as a political technology of power and rule in post-Infitah Egypt (Kotef 2015). Indeed, while the reconfiguration of spatial relations in Cairo as a result of economic liberalization has been thoroughly documented and analyzed (Piffero 2017; Sims 2014; Shawkat 2020), relations of mobility remain understudied. Building on this analysis, I argue that the Road was planned not only as an infrastructure to facilitate the flow of global capital and to cater to a growing automobile economy (Dodson 2017; Barak 2019; Taha 2002), but also as a state effort to govern and discipline the production of urban space and movement(s) in the city and its rural and desert peripheries. This paper builds on literature in biopolitics, the anthropology of infrastructure, and political economy. It aims to enrich our understanding of the many ways that mobility and infrastructure—as products of urban plans, state power, and capital flows—play an integral role in controlling, containing, and disciplining populations across Egypt and the Middle East.