A car-sharing service that launched across the South Bay a year ago, delighting city leaders who hoped it would pull cars off the streets and lower emissions, will suspend its local operations at the end of the month.

Car2go said it will refocus its efforts on persuading the cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach to approve the point-to-point program so it can offer a larger network to its members.

The service, which launched last June, allows members to pick up and drop off the white-and-blue Smart cars within a 28-square-mile swath of the South Bay, including El Segundo, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Lomita, the west half of Torrance and part of Hawthorne. Drivers can find the cars online, via a cellphone app or by spotting them on the street and pay per ride, $15 an hour or $85 per day.

But the company found that people wanted to explore far beyond the South Bay.

“We need a bigger area for members to go to,” said car2go North American President and CEO Paul DeLong. “The South Bay is great. It works. But people from West Hollywood want to come down to the South Bay. And if (South Bay) members want to go up to a restaurant in Santa Monica, they’re forced to bring the vehicle back to the home area.”

Car2go’s South Bay home area is its smallest in North America — 115 cars available for about 4,000 members across 28 miles. In comparison, car2go’s San Diego service offers 400 vehicles for 34,000 members over a 45-square-mile area, and the Seattle service has 677 vehicles and 65,000 registered members over an 83-square-mile home area with 20,000 trips per week. In the South Bay, car2go reported an average of 200 rentals per week.

Car2go, now the world’s largest car-sharing company with more than 1 million members in 29 locations across the world, always envisioned the South Bay as part of a much larger home area in Los Angeles.

“We feel a regional approach with Los Angeles and Long Beach is really important,” DeLong said. “We have to give people more options.”

In the South Bay, the largest percentage of members are in Redondo Beach. The city had nearly 900 residents signed up for the program, City Manager Joe Hoefgen said.

Since the program was approved by the city as a one-year pilot last June, Hoefgen said, he didn’t feel the suspension would hit the city too hard.

“If someone was making regular use of the vehicles, it will have an impact on them,” he said. “Since it was such a brand-new program, we’ll be fine. Residents have taxis, Beach Cities Transit, different ways of getting from Point A to point B.”

Despite some initial pushback from South Bay residents over the cars taking up valuable parking spaces, DeLong emphasized it was not a factor in the program’s suspension.

DeLong and city officials said the complaints from residents died down after an influx at the beginning of the program. Cities with parking meters had also been concerned about losing money.

But in Redondo Beach, from May 2014 to March 2015, car2go vehicles received 418 parking tickets, resulting in $21,114 of parking enforcement revenue for the city.

DeLong did not have an estimate on when the program might be brought back to the South Bay. He said the company has been in talks with Los Angeles city transportation officials, and they are “supportive” of the service.

“We want to come back,” he said. “We’re not closing our service.”