There’s many solutions, all of them involve incentivizing people to become drivers. If people want their Amazon orders so bad, they’ll end up paying. And if they don’t, then they have to re-prioritize what they want.
The disruption is these "moving pods". They are more expensive, but they are well advertised, and one fears that the established small players will be driven out of business.
Trains also aren't that much cheaper. I'm not sure why this is, but my hunch is that much of the cost in transportation is pick up from origin and drop off at destination and this essentially has to be done via truck. So, if you're shipping via train, you incur an additional pick up and drop off, since the goods need to go from the trucker's hub to the train, then from the train to the trucker's hub. That probably erases a lot of the savings that you see when you just calculate costs based on the physics of truck vs. train.
Railroads, on the other hand, pay all their own track maintenance, and even have to pay property taxes on the track. The whole system is tilted against railroads.
If they removed those minimums, the price would go up substantially - your model doesn't include that cost on the train side, it would incur it on you as a shipping aggregator, making your costs uncompetitive.
Just a guess, I haven't done an analysis.
And you can't just say 'there's lots of people for whom $200k would be a lot of money' because there's a lot of people who whom $50k is a lot of money and those jobs aren't filled either.
Short of literally offering a million dollars a year, it's got to be more complicated than how much you offer.
The $50,000/year jobs that aren't being filled have one of:
1. Require years of non-transferable training.
2. Have insane working hours, that make your real pay closer to minimum wage.
3. In especially shitty working conditions.
4. Are in locations where $50,000/year isn't enough to live on.
5. Destroy your body after a few years on the job.
6. Have better-paying, better-work-condition alternatives that use similar skill-sets.
7. Or, more typically, two or more of the above.
That said, if it paid $200k/yr (median or even 75th percentile), the shortage would disappear post haste. The vast majorly of other jobs that pay that much tick boxes 1, 4, or both and are thus logistically out of reach of at least half the population.
If there are alternatives available that use less or cheaper labor, then people will use those instead.
There's no cap for any price. And if the alternatives are cheaper, then maybe that type of business doesn't need to exist in the economy.
That's supply and demand.
I think the job has a very high incident of obesity and heart disease, as it's so sedentary, and a high incident of divorce because it's anti-social.
Driving a truck paid well and the carriers got fat.
After a series of deregulation acts beginning in the 70’s there was a race to the bottom on prices. Many carriers went out of business. Driver pay dropped (all though you could still make a good living doing certain types of OTR.
Swings in the economy are felt in transportation.
Until the trucks drive themselves there will forever be too many/few drivers. It’s the nature of a deregulated industry that moves with the economy.
Every swing in a labor market is not a social crisis. Although we can all probably foresee some real social crises’ related to driver labor in the future and not of the “too little” kind.