Poor planning, IMHO. It brushes past Roosevelt Field, it goes pretty close to Hempstead. Cut it off from the LIRR, and you'd have a good amount of ROW for a somewhat useable LRT starter line.
Freight use? Why bother. It's an uphill battle, the LIRR's connections to everthing else suck, there's few (any?) real viable customers, and frankly, how many of them are NOT time sensitive - i.e., they can deal with the few extra weeks and unpredictability?
(Ditto for a freight terminal on the Cerro Wire site, which IMHO is just screaming to become a big park and ride facility, which if done right, could minimalize neighborhood impact, yet remove a good number of cars from the road)
The real trouble with the remaining stub on the line is it goes from somewhere to pretty much nowhere of any real use, unless you swing it up to Nassau Collusium / Hofstra, or to Roosevelt field, the later would be pretty useless for the LIRR (very expensive, questionable ridership potential), the former wouldn't really generate much traffic unless it was direct (read: electric) service from NYC to the ever exciting Islanders games, and typical events. Even then, it'd be limited in use - only able to capture a thin section of the potential LI market, and let's face it, the home teams aren't going to pull big City numbers anyway. It'd be a killer way to get students to Hofstra, though, and could run as a "Princton Shuttle", though really a DLRV would be better in that usage (much cheaper).
It's annoying, too, because it's quite a bit of track, it just has no real application that stands out and justifies the investment. IMHO, the Nassau Loop BS is just that - I don't get where the big number of riders for such a loop system would be - shoppers want their urban assault vehicles, I doubt the local population would have any real use for it either.
