Traffic lights will stay green longer for cars but be cut back for pedestrians under the transport manifesto of Boris Johnson, the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London.

Mr Johnson has announced a range of measures designed to appeal to drivers, including a pledge to cancel Ken Livingstone’s plan for a £25 daily congestion charge for the most fuel-inefficient cars from October.

Mr Johnson also proposed ending the current high fines for non-payment of the charge and replacing them with a more flexible system — a lower fee for entering the zone outside peak times. But his traffic lights proposal was immediately condemned by Living Streets, formerly the Pedestrians Association, which said the “green man” phase should be lengthened, not shortened, to give elderly people and parents with pushchairs more time to cross safely.

Mr Johnson claimed that Transport for London, Mr Livingstone’s travel authority, had increased the time that lights spend on red in order to slow down traffic. He also said the number of sets of lights had increased by 1,000 to 5,800 since 2001.

“We will rephase traffic lights so that they operate to keep traffic moving smoothly. We can do this without in any way imperilling pedestrians,” he said.

Richard Hebditch, campaigns manager for Living Streets, said: “If we are to encourage walking we need to make it safe, quick and easy to get about on foot — rephasing signals to mean people are waiting on the kerb for longer to be able to cross roads makes walking frustrating.

“Boris Johnson says that he wants to encourage children and adults to walk to work or to school, but making it more difficult to cross the road hardly seems the right way to go about this.”

Living Streets said London had become safer and friendlier to pedestrians in recent years but full green man crossings were still missing at 1,500 sets of lights.

Mr Johnson attempted to appeal to suburban voters by portraying Mr Livingstone as the “zone one mayor”, who had done little to improve transport in outer London boroughs.

He proposed a series of express buses on orbital routes in the suburbs to allow people to avoid travelling into Central London and back out again. Car drivers would be tempted by faster, direct services, with only two or three stops on routes such as Bexley to Richmond or Bromley to Sutton.

He pledged to fund 440 more police community support officers on buses and 50 more police officers to patrol the most dangerous stations in outer London.

The funding would come from cutting the budget for advertising and press officers.

Bendy buses would be phased out and replaced by 2012 with new open-platform buses with conductors, allowing passengers to hop on and off as they did with the old Routemasters.

The Conservative candidate said he would allow motorcycles to use all bus lanes and accused Mr Livingstone of withholding a TfL study which indicated that this would not pose any additional risk to pedestrians or cyclists.

Mr Johnson said: “It is time to stop using pain as the chief utensil by which people are prompted to use public transport. We need to do more than bullying people out of their cars by blocking their streets.”

He pledged in effect to abolish the western extension of the congestion charge zone by saying he would abide by the result of a new consultation with local residents. Previous surveys found residents were strongly opposed to it.

Young people under 18 would lose their free bus passes if they engaged in antisocial behaviour and would have to do community service to earn them back. Mr Johnson also plans to put up more than 10,000 extra cycle stands, using £2 million cut from TfL’s budget for consultants.

Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate in the May 1 election, said: “Boris Johnson’s promise to improve trains and the policing of stations shows he has no idea what the mayor has control over. The British Transport Police and the railways are beyond the mayor’s remit.”

Mr Livingstone’s re-election team said putting conductors on new Routemaster-style buses on bendy bus routes would cost £48 million, resulting in higher bus fares.