Bicycling is the archetype for modern mobilisation. Yet, as if anachronistic to modern life, in most of the world bicyclists now are asked to justify fits for bicycles within public spaces, and the movements of bicyclists are accommodated only within more dominant infrastructure built without the bicycle in mind. Consequently, one is provoked to ask how it is that this most modern of mobilities can be treated as out-of-place within the spaces of contemporary life and social geography.

In response, I suggest that it is not fruitful to analyse the complexities of modern spaces of mobility or to try to solve the competition for space between bicyclists and the drivers of motorised vehicles. Rather, I invite consideration of how the modern possibilities in bicycling have been and are challenged at a more fundamental level with what I am referring to as the phenomenon of mobilities dispossession, on global scales. As social inequalities in the world are traced by critics of globalising capitalism to land dispossession in colonialism, in ongoing manners, I propose that we can understand the contemporary marginalisation of bicycling as founded in forms of mobilities dispossession that are sourced in the same global economic, material, and spatial dynamics.

Motor vehicles have not simply won competitions for existing space against bicycles. The social/political economies of motor vehicle mobilities function to appropriate public mobility as proper to motorised drivers of capitalism, rendering bicycling surplus to public spaces and, paradoxically, rendering the modern possibilities of bicycling threatening to an equally paradoxical conservation of the modern in the privileged needs of motor vehicles. However, in confronting the mobilities dispossession conditioning contemporary bicycling, we may better learn how to affirm bicycling as creatively and positively formative of public spacing. The challenge is to overcome the alienation of human beings from their own movement.