The city is considering opening to bidders other than BIXI. Which might include SoBi or other smartbike-dumbdock system. Electronic U-bars are built into SoBi bikes so they can dock to anything, even a stop sign pole or parking meter pole...
Switching from BIXI to SoBi is vastly superior for suburbs as SoBi smartbikes don't need stations. You can spread more cheap bike racks over a wider area.
Smartbikes have GPS trackers and available bikes show up as dots on your smartphone. They park at plain nike racks.
With 4.9M (funding for expansion) SoBi can cover about 6 to 9 times the area of the current BIXI network. Not even including extra bikes from the proceeds of the resale of used BIXI bikes to another city that uses them (e.g. NYC citibike).
It's also why the 750-bike SoBi system (45 sq km. park anywhere) in Hamilton covers a bigger area and has more active users than the 1000-bike BIXI system in Toronto (15 sq km, 80 stations). Consider that Hamilton is less bike-friendly than Toronto, yet SoBi has full farebox recovery already, with far lower operating cost thanks in part to crowdsourced bike rebalancing.
Suburban bikeshare systems more easily manage full farebox recovery even with 1.5:1 or 1:1 (rides:bike) per day only under smartbike systems (park at any plain rack), rather than smartdock systems. BIXI systems requires 3 or 4 rides per day per bike to cover its operating cost.
I don't think it is a good use taxpayer use of money to spend on outdated BIXI technology in suburbs like GO stations.
Peak commuter flows causes full docks. If we install smartbikes in suburbs we need to choose modern smartbike systems (that can "dock" anywhere) rather than smartdock systems. Also, there is practically no such thing as a full smartbike dock, unlike BIXI.
BIXI is not a good fit for suburban GO stations for these above reasons. At least until BIXI supports docking to any plain pole or dumb bike rack (with an electronic U-bar like SoBi)