A city bus. Not a monument, not a landmark, not architecture designed to impress—just a vehicle that moves people who don’t have cars from where they are to where they need to be. Masumi chose to photograph it anyway.

The Greater Cleveland RTA bus system carried the people left behind by suburban sprawl: workers commuting to jobs that couldn’t afford downtown parking, elderly residents who’d stopped driving, students, immigrants, anyone for whom car ownership remained out of reach. By 1991, ridership had fallen 60% from postwar peaks. Federal funding had dried up. The buses were aging, the routes stretched thin.

And yet the system kept running, kept connecting neighborhoods, kept providing what private automobiles never could: transportation that didn’t require owning a depreciating asset, paying for insurance and fuel and maintenance. Democratic mobility, five dollars at a time.

Masumi applied her panoramic technique to this unglamorous subject—the same approach she brought to Union Terminal and Public Square. The method suggests something about what matters: that civic infrastructure serving ordinary people deserves the same artistic attention as grand architecture serving the powerful. A bus is not just a vehicle. It’s a statement about who belongs in a city.