Before Bullitt and before What's Up, Doc?, Hitchcock showed how to film the streets of San Francisco. Though the scene in Vertigo is more of a detective following his prey, it uses the same location that Bogdanovich later used to a much different effect in his comic chase scene.
Hitchcock also makes the scene unreal in the way that he makes all his car scenes. I used to hate those because they were so unreal, until I realized that he, of course, wanted them to be unreal. And in Vertigo, he makes you dizzy watching them.
