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Banning pre-euro 4 cars (the tax is on both petrol and diesel vehicles) is essentially gesture politics because of the age, and hence very limited number of cars it affects.
Cars this old probably account for less than 5% of all vehicle journeys in a city, so even if owners of these cars just stopped driving would only reduce the pollution by 5%. In reality, the owners will either buy a slightly newer car (which pollutes only slightly less) or just pay the tax and use the car a bit less. This means it will probably be impossible to measure any change in pollution levels as the result of this policy.
As usual with gesture politics though, a small number of people will get absolutely hammered, for no gain to anyone. In this case, it will be the poorer end of London society who need a car or van for their work, so people like newsagents, corner shop owners, window cleaners etc.
If TFL really wanted to reduce pollution in London today, there are two things in their power they could do immediately.
1) Ban Uber (which has led to a huge increase in minicabs sitting in side streets with their engines idling)
2) Accelerate their electric bus and taxi implementation programmes with large grants to cabbies or bus companies as an incentive to change.
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