Improv Everywhere strikes again with Manhattan "Tourist Lane"

It's no secret that New York is a tourist magnet, and as in many of the world's other tourist honeypots, Noo Yawk locals are often guilty of growing impatient with visitors to their frantic metropolis. (I remember attracting a salvo of artful cursing from a cyclist on the Brooklyn Bridge when I drifted into the bike lane to take photos of downtown Manhattan – this was the moment I decided that it wasn't the day I would propose to my wife.)

Playing on New Yorkers' famously brusque attitude towards tourists, a stealth comedy troupe recently painted a white dividing line down a stretch of Fifth Avenue sidewalk and policed the new lanes for a few hours, directing tourists to walk on one side of the line and locals to use the other side (the express lane).

Of course, it was the work of Improv Everywhere, the public pranksters who've made quite a name for themselves over the past few years by filming their carefully co-ordinated real life street theatre. Life is certainly a more interesting dish with these these guys stirring the pot.