And did the cab driver do it if you did? This is a fairly common scene in movies, and not just when a private dick is tailing the bad guy, but regular people seem to do it a lot as well. I have never done it, and no one I asked has either. Or maybe I’m wrong, and this is a common thing for cab drivers?
And yeah, I know a lot of stuff in film is made up. 
Once. In 1967. For 20 minutes.
I have, in fact- quite recently. My family and I went to New York City for a few days, and since we couldn’t fit everyone in one cab, we had to take two. I was in the second cab, and we told the cab driver to follow the first one. He complied nicely, though we did lose the other cab a few streets down!
That’s all I EVER say in a cab…
Joe
No, but oh man, I’d love to.
(Why don’t high-speed death-defying traffic chases ever happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?)
Oh I have, but it wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be. I and my flatmate were moving to a new address and the practical way to do it was to order two estate car taxis each to carry one person in the passenger seat and with the rest of the car full of our stuff. (The taxi company had said this would be cheaper than using a van, although as it turns out, it was probably a pretty useful way to use an extremely newly employed driver.)
So we packed all the stuff in, my friend went in the first car and I got into the other, and enjoyed saying to the driver “follow that car”. BUT the driver merely said “yes, madam”, and seemed to miss the joke, so I felt really bad because from his perspective, it must have seemed that I was very rudely telling him to do exactly what he already knew he was going to do. And you know how silly you feel when you have to explain a joke. 
I see to recall that the driver had only just come from Pakistan very recently and so was probably quite wisely concentrating on getting used to London and so on rather than on the inane jokes of passengers. Embarrassing. I tried to explain but I reckon he thought I was a bit odd. And of course, I felt silly that he had said “madam”, when I must only have been about 25 or so.
Actually I did better than that once. Several years ago my brother and I were in Moscow leaving our hotel in order to get a train going to Helsinki, Finland. There were several train stations in Moscow, but only one from which the trains went to Finland. And so, as we got into a taxi, I said to the driver with all the drama I could manage “To The Finland Station.”
Rather dull hijack…
I seem to always be saddled with family and friends who want to tell me to go to an unfamiliar place by saying, “just follow my car!”
“What’s the address?”
“Aah, don’t worry. Just follow me…”
I really don’t like it. Not only can you get separated in traffic, but the risk of separation leads both drivers to do dangerous things, and if a light just turns yellow, the first car will brake so as not to be separated, and the following car will hit the gas at the same moment, for the same reason. I once led a friend of mine about ten miles, and when we got there, she complained about how slowly I was driving. I had been driving slowly because I thought she was.
Following a friends car - not so bad, once you get used to it EXCEPT when they don’t know what those little orange lights on the corner of the car are for. Then they get a scolding
I frequently told Chinese cabs to follow the cab in front of them, since it contained my friends who knew where we were going.
Not exactly, but did run out into the street and flag some total stranger down, jump in and say it. We were chasing a “just stolen” car.
Pretty exciting stuff, actually.
Yeah, bad move. I was in San Fracisco with a group of folk danders and we decided to go to a Chinese restaurant. A Chinese friend of ours knew of a couple of good ones, picked one and gave me the “just follow me” routine. I should have insisted on the address, and now I do, because she kept jumping yellow lights leaving me with the red. We made it but there were some close calls.
Yeah, bad move. I was in San Francisco with a group of folk dancers and we decided to go to a Chinese restaurant. A Chinese friend of ours knew of a couple of good ones, picked one and gave me the “just follow me” routine. I should have insisted on the address, and now I do, because she kept jumping yellow lights leaving me with the ensuing red. We made it but there were some close calls.
I had a similar experience. About ten years ago I went with most of the company to Siggraph (a big computer graphics trade show) in New Orleans. We had an invitation to an exhibitors-only party at Mardi Gras World, but only one of us knew where the party was. The person with the invitation was in the first cab while I was in the second cab and one of my co-workers was delighted to be able to use that line.
Tuesday - yes, it was Tuesday when I saw my congressman coming out of the titty bar.
He didn’t look like my congressman, but that’s okay - nobody really looks like themselves anymore. I think its got something to do with that crap they’ve been pouring into the water
I decided it might be wise to follow the congressman just to see what he was up to. After all, my tax dollars do pay his salary.
The congressman got into a taxi, so I hailed a taxi. Despite the obvious dangers involved.
The congressman was in taxi number 23 and I was in cab 17. But numbers are meaningless in this kind of cat and squid game. My driver was an Aries and he laughed when I said “Follow that cab!” And he kept laughing until he saw the cold blue steel of Little Elvis.
“Keep your god-damn hands off that radio!” I warned him “I work for the government!”
This is actually a half truth - I’m really a bike courier. But I make a lot of deliveries to government offices. That’s where I heard about the cheese…
dazed look
Ok uhm…I think that was me, but maybe not. Come to think of it, maybe it was this guy I know named Peter Bazooka. But I swear, some people just don’t want to get involved…
To answer the O.P. only when I was stalking celebrities.
But to be serious if in the U.K. you see two white vans one behind the other in traffic assume that they are going to stick together like glue,they are NOT going to let you in and the second one will almost certainly run a red light if the lead van has got through the lights as they changed .
They are almost certainly building contractors ,the lead van knows the location of the job the second driver doesnt and is following him and in the U.K,construction industry time is big bucks.
Rural Wisconsin here,what is a taxi? Seriously, I have said that in Chicago, following a car of family, the exact scenario presented by Cockatiel. Not only did the driver follow, I think we got there first.
No, but a couple of times I told a cab driver “I’ll follow you to this or that address”.