Potential London mayoral candidate Boris Johnson has called for London's bus operators to be given a share of passenger revenue to encourage them to improve customer service.

The capital's bus operators used to retain on-bus revenue under net cost contracts, but these were phased out from the late 1990s. All on-bus revenue is now passed to Transport for London, a system which Johnson wants reformed.

"Unlike the bus companies anywhere else in the United Kingdom, these London bus companies do not have a revenue structure related to the number of passengers they carry or the fares they receive: oh no, that would be far too commonsensical," he wrote on his website earlier this month.

He continued: "[Bus companies] are simply paid to ply the route, and they are paid according to a formula that depends on the number of miles travelled during the day; and so the buses' real incentive is to whizz around London as fast as possible with as few passengers as possible, and certainly not to linger for a straggler."

Johnson said that allowing bus companies to retain revenue would motivate them to crack down on fare dodgers "who are now epidemic on the bendy buses".

A TfL spokesperson said: "A major factor in the success of London's bus network has been the use of Quality Incentive Contracts, which reward bus operators for meeting high standards of service. The contracts Boris Johnson proposes were used in London during the 1980 and 1990s and they simply did not work. The current contracts in use have brought quality to the highest levels ever recorded."

Johnson meanwhile described bendy buses as "cyclist killing". London mayor Ken Livingstone said no fatalities had been linked to bendy buses and accused his rival of scaremongering.