How are you defining "essential"? There are bus services and other air options for most of these ares. There are places all over North America that don't have rail passenger service, and people somehow make do without demanding that new rail lines be built to serve them beause rail is "essential". An argument I see above is that the Amtrak deficit is just a rounding error for choose-your-program. But just because we don't waste as much there as we do elsewhere doesn't make it a good thing. I continue to think that if they replace Amtrak 3-4 with bus over the middle of its route, I've already written it off as a travel option, because I've already had bus on that route when I didn't expect it.