Residents of New York City put up with a lot to live in their city, not the least of which includes dodging lumbering, slack-jawed, luggage-toting tourists who clog the sidewalks and slow them from making it to their Very Important Destinations.

To solve this problem, we divided a sidewalk in the Flatiron District into two lanes – one for tourists and one for New York City residents – using spray-chalk stencils and a wheeled line-marker.

Then we posed as employees from the Department of Transportation to inform passing pedestrians about the lane and to gauge feedback. We left after a few hours, but the tourist lane stayed.

In the following days, the unauthorized city improvement was blogged extensively, written about by all of the city’s major press outlets, speculatively attributed to street art superstar Banksy, and even hailed by Mayor Bloomberg.

We watched tight-lipped for three weeks before releasing our video and claiming credit for the stunt.

Further reading: full write-up from Improv Everywhere