Two years ago I made a decision to ditch my car and start navigating the growing universe of transportation offerings available in the city.

One of my first decisions was to join the car-share service Zipcar, which has about 470 cars in its fleet spread across roughly 200 locations. Zipcar, along with public transit, cycling, the occasional cab ride, and a bit of day-before planning, has made it quite simple to move around the city without worrying about the hassle of car ownership: insurance, repairs, fuel costs, and parking.

There are currently three major car-share options in Toronto. In addition to Zipcar, there is Toronto-founded AutoShare, which has about 300 cars across 150 locations, and the Daimler-owned Car2Go, which launched this summer with 250 Smart Fortwo cars scattered across 200 city-owned Green P parking lots.

In all, Torontonians now have access to more than 1,000 vehicles at 550 different city spots, making car-sharing more ubiquitous in this city than all Tim Horton’s, Starbucks, Second Cup and Timothy’s coffee shop locations combined.

It’s tempting to view the three as competing services; to labour over choosing one over the other the same way you might weigh the pros and cons of different cellphone service. The companies surely view themselves as competitors.

But for the consumer it’s not necessarily a choice of this “or” that. I decided this month to also join AutoShare and Car2Go because for an extra $45 a year, beyond what I would pay per hour or minute to sign out a car, doing so has dramatically expanded my travel options. (Pay-per-use fees range from about $10 to $12 an hour).

AutoShare and Zipcar may be quite similar, but having extra locations and cars to choose from is comforting. Just being with Zipcar, for example, I occasionally found it difficult to book a car nearby at the time it was needed. AutoShare now serves as a backup for Zipcar, and vice versa.

The vehicles in each company’s fleets are also different, offering the chance to try out different types of cars, such as the hybrid-electrics (Chevy Volts and Toyota Priuses) and all-electric vehicles (Nissan Leafs and Mitsubishi i-MiEVs) in AutoShare’s growing fleet.

Car2Go is quite different from both AutoShare and Zipcar in that you don’t have to return the vehicle to its original location. Instead, you can take one-way trips and only pay by the minute, not the hour.

The catch is you can only reserve a car up to 24 hours in advance, or just take your chances. If there’s one parked in a city Green P lot, you just swipe your member card against a device attached to the car’s windshield and you’re off.

This came in handy last week when, having rode my bicycle to work, I didn’t feel well enough at the end of the day to cycle home. I found a Green P lot a block from the office, grabbed a Smart car, and drove it to a lot near my home in the Beaches. A ride in a cab would have been twice as expensive.

Kevin McLaughlin, founder and president of AutoShare, prefers to think of Car2Go as a “self-driving taxi” service and not true car-sharing. “By far their (Car2Go’s) biggest impact, at least at the beginning, will be on taxis, Bixi (bike sharing), walking and even transit.”

Even with three services now operating in Toronto, the market continues to grow “very well,” says McLaughlin. “We are having our biggest growth this year by far.”

Christian Demers, general manager of Zipcar’s Toronto office, says he doesn’t expect that growth to slow down. “If you look at the development going on downtown it simply can’t slow down,” he says. “It will drive more people to join car-share programs because parking spots are less and less available.”

Innovation will also continue to grow the pie. The Zipcar, AutoShare and Cars2Go business models aren’t economical in areas with low population densities, such as the suburbs. This has created opportunity for peer-to-peer car sharing – services that allow car owners to rent out their own vehicles hourly, right out of their own driveways, when they’re not using them.

Earlier this month, General Motors’ announced that any GM vehicle equipped with the OnStar service could be rented out by the owner through a partnership with the peer-to-peer car-share service RelayRides, which started out in Boston and San Francisco and has since expanded its offering throughout the United States. It’s only a matter of time before it comes to Canada.

Ontario law currently disallows peer-to-peer car sharing, so legislative changes would be required, but both established players such as Zipcar and AutoShare and new players are kicking the tires and keen to experiment.

“People are still trying to figure it out,” says Demers, adding that wireless connectivity, GPS, the Web and the management of all three through increasingly advanced software has brought concepts like vehicle sharing to a new level.

“The technology in all these vehicles, like OnStar, changes the landscape of what you can do versus where we were 10 years ago,” he says.

The big caveat is that there will continue to be a big percentage of the population that, because of where they live or the nature of their work, simply can’t benefit from car-sharing.

It’s not for all people—but it is for a lot of people, such as the growing number of folks who work from home or have flexibility with their job. For this reason, car-sharing isn’t just here to stay, it will – has? – become an increasingly visible reality of city life, and a welcome one.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

Yes, all of those new office towers being built around downtown Toronto are messing up traffic, and the construction cranes jutting out of the skyline like garden weeds are a temporary eyesore.

The good news is these buildings are becoming greener and smarter – both in the way they are constructed and how they operate.

Not to suggest tower developers suddenly have environmental religion. Profit still drives their activities. But there is change happening in the world of commercial building construction, and while for some it could move faster and stretch deeper, the fact that efficiency, environmental footprint and tenant well-being are being factored into design is a good thing.

Last month, Oxford Properties, the real-estate arm of the Ontario Municipal Employment Retirement System, revealed that it and its partners will spend an additional $500,000 to achieve “LEED Platinum” certification for the RBC WaterPark Place tower they are building on Queens Quay, between Bay and York Streets.

The building will be cooled using cold water pumped in from Lake Ontario. Special glazings will be put on windows to allow for more natural light while improving insulation. Pumps that drive ventilation, heating and cooling will be more efficient, and tenants will have more control over lighting and climate within specific rooms or “zones.”

LEED (Leader in Energy and Environmental Design) is a standard that at its simplest certifies the greenness of a building. The highest certification is platinum, and RBC WaterPark Place – to be the new headquarters for Royal Bank of Canada, which is taking up two-thirds of the 930,000 square foot tower—will be the first in Toronto to achieve that status.

Projected total cost: $400 million.

It won’t be alone for long. The reality is that few new office towers in Toronto and other major urban centres don’t have some level of LEED certification, whether silver, gold or platinum.

It’s become a bit boring really. Reminds me of when retailers started launching e-commerce sites on the Web during the dot-com boom. The first few were interesting. After that, it became more newsworthy if someone (a laggard such as Hudson’s Bay Co., for example) wasn’t selling online.

Commercial developers are realizing two things: tenants are taking corporate social responsibility more seriously and increasingly demanding more sustainable, healthier office spaces; and the cost premium for meeting that demand can typically be recovered in a few years.

“It’s becoming very much part of our industry,” said Blake Hutcheson, president and chief executive of Oxford. “This whole movement by Oxford and others to make our buildings greener, smarter, more efficient, I would characterize as an unequivocal win, win, win.

“Tenants win because they want it and are the net beneficiary of being in a much better building in terms of the environment, quality of work, and usability. Your investors win because, unless you get really leading-edge with your approach, there are arguably pretty good paybacks and it does make your building more valuable.”

More valuable because operating costs related to water and energy use are much lower, and in urban centres like downtown Toronto building owners can lease out spaces at a premium.

Hutcheson said Oxford benefits internally as well. “We hear more and more that our people want to be with a company that’s branded for doing good things, not doing yesterday’s stuff. As a result, we’re attracting really bright, really capable people who are inspired by some of the things that we’re doing.”

Empowering tenants to adjust their own behaviours is also a growing trend. Cadillac Fairview recently launched a new “green portal” for the six towers that make up its Toronto-Dominion Centre. It’s basically a website dashboard that lets tenants track and compare their respective energy use.

David Hoffman, the centre’s general manager, said it’s an effective application of the “manage what you measure” principle.

In many ways it’s about taking a more holistic view of building design and construction, one that takes into account the availability of technology to digitally connect together building components or systems that previously existed in silos.

With that big-picture view, combined with building automation and greater tenant and building manager control, these new commercial towers rising above Toronto are truly becoming smarter.

Earlier this month, Cisco Canada held an industry roundtable to discuss this very issue. The executives who spoke, representing construction, engineering and commercial property management companies, all agreed that the trend is real.

“The fact we’re here in a meeting with Cisco would be unheard of 10 years ago,” said Armin von Eppinghoven, executive vice-president of MMM Group, one of the largest engineering and consulting firms in the country. “We’re in the middle of a transition that in the next little while should become clear.”

Mind you, that doesn’t address what we do with all the older, less efficient buildings that represent the bulk of the city’s inventory. As Hutcheson pointed out, new buildings are only a tiny – “quite novel” – percentage of the whole.

Julian Brandon, senior vice-president at commercial real-estate consultant DTZ Barnicke, said more tenants want the LEED-type standard, convenient amenities and closeness to public transit.

There is a “musical chairs” of real estate going on, he added. “The older buildings are being left behind. What are those old buildings going to do?”

A good question we should be trying our best to answer.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.