Alexei Sayle, writing in The Independent made this observation. He then goes on to add:

So, in a town where car status is everything, walking throws everybody into confusion because you can’t easily rank somebody who’s walking. I remember on our first night at the Chateau Marmont we went out for a walk along a deserted Sunset Boulevard and up ahead of us was a single pedestrian. “I bet they’re British,” I said and when we got up to them, they turned out not only to be British but also to be Billy Bragg.

One never reads of people walking about LA, the only instance that comes to mind is Steve Martin’s book The Pleasure of My Company. The narrator of that book is decidedly abnormal in so many other ways that this seems just a minor glitch.