Trimming half of a 10 ft tall privacy hedge

[Bruce P.]

Hi BP,

Thinking of doing a driveway widening project for a single family home (no apron modification). To widen the driveway, I'd like to trim half of a 10 foot tall and maybe 7-8 ft wide privacy hedge (my adjoining neighbor is ok with that).

One issue I'm running into - talking with others it's possible that the machines used to help trim (and tear out?) the hedges would accidentally rip out the whole hedge or even if they could do only "half" a hedge, the hedge might die due to the sudden loss of 50% of itself.

Other than to manually trim 50% of the hedge without touching the roots (sounds expensive), is there a near maintenance-free way to approach this? E.g., could you manually trim the hedge and then put some kind of plastic dividing wall to keep the hedge from encroaching and force it to grow towards the neighbor's yard so you only have to trim it once in a while?  I realize this probably isn't doable, but I thought I'd tap into the community for ideas.