Dozens of residents showed up to a public meeting on Saturday to hear details about plans for the long-discussed relief subway line.

The session at St. James Cathedral is one of three public consultations being held across the city this week as staff seek input on the plans for the first phase of the relief line, which would travel along Queen Street and Eastern Avenue before turning north at Carlaw Avenue and connecting with Line 2 on Danforth Avenue.

The estimated cost of the project is $6.8 billion.

“It is still a couple years away (breaking ground) and I know that is part of thing that people find frustrating, that there is so much planning and design, but these are big decisions that could cost hundreds of millions so we have to listen and we have to refine the project,” Mayor John Tory told CP24. “Building a subway in a developed city is a bigger task than building one say in a green field area. We are obviously trying to move this ahead as quickly as we possibly can. This is a top priority and that is why this meeting is happing on a Saturday.”

TTC staff have long identified the relief subway line as the city’s biggest transit priority due to the overcrowding that exists along the Yonge subway line.

The idea behind the line is that by providing an alternative route from downtown to the east end, crowding would be reduced at interchange stations such as Bloor-Yonge and St. George.

“The platforms are crowded to the point sometimes that it is not even completely safe,” Tory said Saturday. “If we give people a different way to get downtown or to the east end of the city it will provide huge relief for the overcrowding that we presently experience and that is why I think it has always been a very important and its why I am so anxious to proceed ahead with it.”

Council has already approved alignment

City council has previously approved the alignment for the relief line and work is now under way on a series of environmental assessments.

Director of Transit and Transportation Planning James Perttulatold CP24 that it was important to hold the public consultations now so staff can answer questions from residents who are concerned about the potential impact on their properties.

“As we are moving along in the project we are starting to identify where there may be property impacts so people are coming with questions about what will it mean to have a subway running under their property or down the road,” he said. “Those are certainly understandable concerns and we are working to explain the process to them and what it will mean for them.”

Tory said that he did hear concerns from residents about potential noise from the subway as well as the impact of long-term construction on neighbourhoods along the route.

He said that there were also concerns raised about the “small number” of properties that may have to be expropriated to make room for the subway.

“There will be a number of properties that will be expropriated for this and that always concerns people so we are hearing about that but that is why we have these meetings, so we can explain things,” he said.

The city has received $150 million in provincial funding to pay for planning and design work on the relief line.

Though the cost of the project remains unfunded the federal government has said that it will provide $4.8 billion for the expansion of Toronto’s transit networks over the next decade, money that the province has agreed to match.