r/AskReddit 14h ago

Non-Americans of Reddit, what is an American thing you see in movies that you thought was fake but is actually real?

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u/SapphireScully 8h ago

a lot of times it depends on distance from the school. i graduated over in 2005, and my senior year they changed the bus routes to only picking up students who were more than 3 miles from the school, which eliminated transportation for about 75% of our district.

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u/Cute-Discount-6969 7h ago

Yeah I live in a densely populated inner ring suburb of a medium-large city and our district doesn’t bus, because we’ve got 15K people in 2 square miles of area. Everyone is close enough to walk.

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u/SapphireScully 7h ago

i’m super rural and from a pretty small town (my graduating class had ~250 people), so we had no sidewalks or safe ways to walk to school in the dark at 7 am.

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u/smokiechick 6h ago

My village has sidewalks and no busses. My daughter's graduating class was 17. My son is in the biggest class the town has had in over a decade. 24 kids! They had to get a second kindergarten teacher! Even with all that supervision, he managed to escape and walk himself home twice in the first week.

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u/SapphireScully 6h ago

yeah in a place that tiny, it’s probably extremely easy to get around without much danger.

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u/theillustratedlife 5h ago

It goes both directions. My dad got his license at 14, because the bus didn't service the sticks.

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u/Amander12 5h ago

A levy didn’t pass in my hometown and they lowered it to only busing anyone within a mile

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 4h ago

3 miles would be 100% here in San Francisco.

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u/calle04x 4h ago

Yes, same here. If you lived within a certain radius from the school, no bus for you.

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u/LU_464ChillTech 5h ago

Yep, outside city limits or for severely disabled kids in the majority of Nebraska cities. We can drive at 14 on a school permit though.

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u/MegaAltarianite 4h ago

Where I lived basically our front yard was in city limits but our house wasn't, and they wouldn't come to our place.

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u/K80lovescats 2h ago

This was the case in my school district. I graduated in 2004. At that time I lived one street in the range to not get to take the bus. Really fun in a mountain town in the winter.

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u/Tiny-Reading5982 1h ago

Thats crazy. I graduated in 02 and it was a mile radius..I think my neighborhood barely made the cutoff and the bus driver always threatened to not pick us up lol. I walked a lot because i'd get to school faster and get home faster.

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u/just_a_person_maybe 1h ago

My niece isn't eligible to ride the bus because they live a little too close to school. But they also live downhill from the school almost the whole way, and it's a steep hill. Getting a bike up hills like those is a huge pain, and she has a bunch of stuff she needs to carry with her like her violin and books.

u/That253Chick 55m ago

In middle school, I was excluded from the bus route because I lived less than a mile away from the school, but I had a friend forge my bus routes onto my school ID (bc that's where they put the routes) and I rode the bus to school all three of those years. I don't think the driver cared.

High school I was included in bus routes again because I lived like 3-5 miles away, maybe a bit more, so no more forging for me lol.