Axe your tree fetish, Boris: it's transport we care about

Still, no need to worry about your straitened income, Boris, because with policy proposals as feeble as your latest - a new tree for every London street - you'll soon be back at the journalistic coalface.

Boris says that: "Tree-lined streets add to the sense of community and security - they help us breathe, for God's sake. Let's have more of them and make London green again."

I barely know where to begin refuting this twaddle. But I don't want to live in a community of trees, chatting with oaks or silver birches and commiserating with them about the hooligan of a eucalyptus that's insinuated itself at the end of the block.

Besides, London is already rated - in terms of sheer herbage - as one of the greenest major cities in the world: we have parks, we have gardens, we have trees in abundance.

No, Boris's wooden "initiative" is really just a pre-emptive caber tossed at the current incumbent because the £3 million budgeted for planting the trees is to be gained by axing the Mayor's newspaper, The Londoner. Well, the wood pulp Londoner may not win any awards for fine writing but it does give Ken an opportunity to tell us what he's actually doing about the most important environmental issue affecting us flesh-andblood Londoners - transport.

Love Ken Livingstone or hate him - and I'm certainly strongly ambivalent - we have to acknowledge he has grasped the nettle of what his office can actually do. It was Ken who pushed for full control by London Underground of Tube maintenance, and foresaw the farrago that would ensue if this was carved off from service operation. The collapsed PPP that has led to a taxpayers' bailout of the Tube renovation consortium cannot be laid at his door.

We voters have loved Oyster Card and hated the bendy buses. We have watched, bemused, as the desperately needed Crossrail link has been kicked back and forth. And, of course, we all have an opinion on the Congestion Charge.

Yesterday, Boris came out a bit on the Charge and, surprise, surprise, he says he will get rid of the western extension - where the bulk of True Blues stable their Bentleys. This may be a crowd-pleaser but along with his assertion that he will be "less punitive" on drivers, it hardly seems an integrated transport policy.

This policy needs to be coherent, achievable, and to do something to improve the lives of all those whom he wants to elect him - not just the

Chelsea farmers. No amount of political grandstanding will make the London Mayoralty an admired institution; we don't care how many City nabobs get their hands shaken or whether our Mayor struts about on the world stage as our "ambassador". We know full well we live in the coolest city on earth; what we want is someone who will make it easier for us to traverse its streets without our blood boiling. Neither more treehugging nor driving will help one jot.