A curious thing appeared on a downtown DC sidewalk this week: Dedicated lanes for pedestrians talking on cellphones, with an express lane to the side for everyone else.

Photo by Rob Pegoraro on Flickr.

The lanes aren’t a half-baked experiment from DDOT. They’re actually a stunt from National Geographic.

National Geographic workers added the sidewalk lanes, with permission from DDOT, to film people’s reactions for an upcoming TV show about human behavior.

Film crews recorded pedestrians’ reactions for several hours yesterday. The most common reaction seemed to be curiosity, but according to Yahoo! Tech columnist Rob Pegoraro, the new lanes did inspire many people to move to one side or the other.

The sidewalk lanes are marked on the 1000 block of 18th Street NW, between K Street and L Street.

This might have drawn inspiration from a “tourist lane” New York-based group Improv Everywhere painted on a Manhattan sidewalk in 2010.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.