Seventeen months after it began St. Paul service, car-sharing service Car2go wants to cut back, ending city-wide operations and limiting itself to certain high-use areas.

The issue is set to be discussed at a St. Paul City Council meeting on Wednesday.

Car2go provides short-term rentals of pint-sized two-seat Smart cars, which it scatters around the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis with the keys inside. Members commandeer the blue-and-white autos through a mobile app, use them for commutes or errands and then leave them parked for the next users.

Car2go has about 22,000 registered members in St. Paul and Minneapolis. They have at their disposal 535 cars that “move between the two cities,” Car2go spokesman Bradley Ducey said.

Under the new plan, though, St. Paul users would be limited to a service area in roughly the middle of the city, along the Interstate 94 corridor, with northern, southeastern and southwestern sections of the city excluded.

St. Paul locations outside the new service area would include the Como Zoo, the new Target store in Highland Park and El Burrito Mercado on the West Side, among thousands of other addresses. Someone using Car2go could drive to these locations, but would be required to re-enter the service area in order to relinquish the auto without penalty.

Car2go said its proposed move is necessary because its cars tend to sit idle in lower-demand areas, which include the East Side and sections north of Minnehaha Avenue.

At the same time, customers in high-demand areas complain that cars are not always readily available, Ducey said. As a rule of thumb, the company wants its vehicles parked no more than a five-minute walk away, he noted.

But the service changes would potentially create confusion and inconvenience for customers who now have the entirety of St. Paul as well as Minneapolis at their disposal for one-way as well as two-way drives.

One-way trips would become problematic for those wanting to start in Car2go’s service area but with a St. Paul destination outside that area. What’s more, city residents living on the East Side, the West Side and other areas now served by Car2go would no longer have convenient access to the service.

Ducey said Car2go is aware of this and will reach out to users in the portions of St. Paul that would see suspended service. The company is potentially capable of making accommodations based on such conversations, though it makes no promises.

St. Paul officials aren’t happy about Car2go’s proposal, but do not appear able to prevent the Germany-based service from implementing such a move or pulling out of the city entirely.

“I’m not real thrilled with it,” City Council President Russ Stark said. “But apparently what they’ve communicated to Public Works is that it’s this or nothing.”

Stark expressed hope that if the smaller service region received council approval, Car2Go will be able to grow its customer base and eventually return to serving a larger area.

Car2go customer Peter Vader is blunter in his unhappiness with the company’s proposed move — and said its logic escapes him.

“I think any entity allowed access and privilege by the city should be held to service the entire city,” said Vader, who lives in Minneapolis and sometimes uses Car2to to drive from that city into into St. Paul.

Car2go staffers who are perpetually out and about are able to move vehicles out of idle areas and into high-demand sections, Vader noted.

“Car2go has the resources in place to alleviate the complaints they have brought to the city,” he said.

Vader compares Car2go to the Nice Ride Minnesota bike-rental service with check-out kiosks scattered around the metro area.

“The bikes in their system can bunch up during certain times of the day or week,” he noted. “Nice Ride uses staff to move bikes around to where they’re needed and remove bikes where racks are overloaded.”

Car2go customer Ali Lozoff, who lives in Minneapolis and works in St. Paul, reacted to the company’s proposal via a Twitter direct message with an emphatic, all-caps “COME ON.”

She added, “It’s so blatantly prejudiced on race/class it’s crazy. If they get breaks on parking meters they should service the areas.”

Lozoff noted that “if areas are underserved by car2go I’ll be less likely to use it to travel in those areas and will take Uber or taxis. That will reduce how much I use c2g overall. Stupid.”

Ducey said Car2go also is thinking about pruning its Minneapolis service footprint, and said it has had preliminary chats with city officials there about this.

The company began Minneapolis-wide service in October 2013.

“We are still having discussions with Minneapolis officials about the possibility of adjusting our Home Area there, but we don’t have any finalized plans to share yet,” Ducey said.

The city, however, recently finished a two-year experiment with Car2go along with car-share services Zipcar and St. Paul-based HourCar, and is now considering its options.

“We are in the process of analyzing the data, and looking at the lessons learned,” city parking system manager William Cieminski said.

At some point the Minneapolis City Council would need to sign off on a formal auto-sharing policy, along with the related ordinance changes, Cieminski said.

How Car2go would fit into this, precisely, is still unclear, he said.

Car2go has already implemented service-area reductions in other North American cities, including Austin, Texas; Denver, Miami, San Diego and Calgary in Canada, according to Ducey.

Find Julio Ojeda-Zapata at ojezap.com. Frederick Melo contributed to this report.