Here is the article covering that:

"Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads."

It then goes on to sort-of suggest that despite this new pain the net benefit will be better for "working-class" people......somehow. No thoughts were offered on how to keep the toll revenue from just padding out civil servant pensions and benefits while the traffic and roads muddle on.

As I understand it, the idea is that if you're already collecting sales and gasoline taxes to pay for roads, collecting the same amount of money through tolls instead isn't any more regressive (it replaces one regressive tax with another), plus it cuts down on traffic.

On the other hand, replacing income tax with tolls really would be regressive.

(But I don't know enough about taxes to say if that's really true.)

It covers that rather poorly:

Experts have pointed to tolls as a traffic solution for decades, yet building political support for road fees continues to be a challenge — the most common complaint being: "Oh, so only rich people can drive?"

This critique ignores the fact that working Americans often suffer the most severely from the impacts of poor mobility. Working-class parents who are late to pick up their kids from day care, for example, often pay severe financial penalties. Having the option to reach their destination quickly could actually save them money. In fact, experience with dynamic tolling in the United States has shown that people of all income levels use these lanes. This objection also ignores just how inequitable and dysfunctional our current system is. Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads.

So the LA Times defines ≠rich as "working/working-class Americans," and ultimately concludes that "tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but be so do sales taxes, gas taxes, and every other way we pay for roads."

So what's one more regressive tax–"inequitable and dysfunctional"–to the poor?

The LA Times's internally-consistent value system is well-matched by its penetrating insight.