I can say with some authority that one of the main reasons the industry is not attracting younger people is pay, it's that simple. Couplw that with the long time away from home, sleeping in cramped quarters and having to walk across a parking lot in all weather to get a shower and you have a situation that many would find distasteful.
When I first started OTR in 1987, the going rate for an experienced driver was twenty five cents a mile. Put that into an inflation adjustment calculator to today and you get $.55. There are damned few companies out there starting drivers at $.55, but even if they all were, it means the drivers in this industry have not gotten a raise outside inflation for 30 years.
Many companies have altered routing to more regional work, allowing drivers more frequent home time. Meeting another driver coming from the other direction at a halfway point and swapping trailers is becoming more common. UPS has been doing this sort of thing for years, allowing a drivers to go out 300 miles, swap trailers and head home and do so all in the legal 10 or (now) 11 hour driving time framework. This is a good thing, but it is still a relatively small percentage of trips.
Also, in spite of some opinions stated above, Owner Operators make up only about 10% or so of the total number of long haul drivers. That trend is upward slightly, but the percentage of the total has been fairly flat over the last few decades. While it is true that some large fleets made a push toward OO's in their fleets (JB Hunt is an example) it is not a major, industry wide trend. There are still plenty of "Company driver" only firms out there and there always have been firms that employ both OO's and company drivers.
Another major issue the way I see it is the overwhelming prevalence of paying by the mile. This is essentially "piecemeal" wages. The longer and harder you work, the more you make. Before the advent of electronic logging devices, this led to drivers cheating on their logbooks in order to disguise actual hours of service. Many drivers gave up the industry when the ELD's came into being because...well...basically cause they couldn't cheat anymore.
The solution is to go to an hourly rate of pay, system wide. It's easy to do and if a driver is sitting still in traffic he would still get paid, unlike the current system where most drivers don't make a cent waiting for an accident to clear, for instance.
The industry has two choices; Raise driver pay to attract more young people into the business or go full autonomous, and the latter isn't likely to happen for quite a while.
As far as moving more freight to rail, for the most part, all the freight that makes the most economic sense to ship by rail, already is. Trains are most efficient when they are moving a large quantity of the same thing from point A to a point B a long way away. Think coal or grains or containers and piggyback trailers. They aren't stopping every hundred miles and off loading trailers or dropping railcars.
To demonstrate how much faster a truck is compared to a train, if I picked up a container in Oakland right after it was offloaded from a ship, I could be in Wendover before the train it would be loaded on got to Reno. If I was running a team, I could be in Chicago in 35 hours. The train would take 3 days. Even running solo I can beat the train by 24 hours.
Prices have to go up, there is no doubt. But how much of that will actually go into the pocket of the drivers remains a question. The job should pay $70,000 a year MINIMUM.
We shall see what happens in the coming years.
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