Actually you don't. A well known attack against trucking is to suspend a cinder block from an overpass, just high enough for the cars to miss it but not the trucks. People put them up in the middle of the night and are miles away before an incident.
Dropping caltrops on a secondary road at night would also work. Rigging a drone to drop chaff on a freeway, etc, would also get the perpetrator physically away from the action. Really, with some creativity, surprisingly crude attacks can shut down a road with minimal exposure of the perp.
A decade ago, the Beltway Sniper terrorized my neighborhood for two weeks. It turned out to be a teenage boy and a certifiably insane adult with some military training. A similar attack by someone who actually knew what they were doing and who wasn't addled would have been very, very difficult to catch. Much less if the attack were, say, from wooded roadsides that overlooked interstates.
I'm fairly sure if you just park your car in front of the truck on a remote highway the drive safety systems will kick in and stop the truck. Then you jump out and crowbar/bolt-cutter the container.
Of-course it will probably detect you doing that and call for help complete with its GPS position.
I also expect some enterprising think-outside-the-box robbers will temporarily come up with some creative way round this. (Will phone jammers stop the truck calling for help?)
You would divert them to some surface streets like 15, 1, 301, 66. You'd ensure they not use 95 by putting up a sign on the onramp that says road closed and you'd leave it unplowed while you focused your efforts on keeping other routes clear. Many trucks would probably just lay up at a gas station.
Redirecting the truck seems unlikely, but dropping a couple traffic cones in front of one in the middle of nowhere and calmly unloading it with no driver to hassle you will be a lot easier.
That's a cute high-tech solution. A simpler one is to put a horizontal bar, the same height as the tunnel's ceiling, which will physically stop the truck before causing millions worth of damages. It's often done in France, sometimes with an early warning: a first arch with chains hanging to the maximal height. It makes a lot of noise on the truck's top, but won't destroy it.
So, if this is such an obvious thing, why wouldn’t you think there are countermeasures for that? As people have said, the trucks have (or very likely have) axels that self-destruct. They also could have a trailer hitch that self-destructs if you attempt to disconnect it. The hitch could also be custom made to be too large/small/wrong shape for a traditional hitch. The lines that connect to the air brakes (that lock up without air pressure) could be custom made to not fit, or self-destruct, or both. The cab could have a kill switch that destroys or disables the engine. And of course, we don’t actually know which of these are actually used, and what additional security measures there are. So any bad actor would have to gain access to detailed security plans without it being discovered or attack blind and hope they have accounted for everything and can overcome known and unknown security.
Seems a bit more complicated than just unhooking the trailer and driving off.
It's a nice niche solution for non-violent "nuisance" issues, but it will only scale to the point where the cost of temporary criminal activity shutdown and/or location movement is less than the risk/cost of dirt-cheap anti-materiel sabotage actions against the truck. A very, very low bar to hurtle.
Examples: Thermite + Firecracker Ignition against an axle, Short-range "spray painting" of camera portals w/ heat-set epoxy, Long-range shooting of camera portals with suppressed sub-sonic ammo or high-powered air rifles.
Additionally, the very minute a reasonably well-educated/funded home-owner brings a case against the "nuisance" claim to court, any further use of the truck would be limited to the local municipality's statutory limits on mere infractions (non-crimes)--typically no more than 24 hours.
To enable the truck to loiter any longer, the local prosecutor would have to file formal criminal charges and declare the particular residence a "crime zone".
Stop the truck using a couple of vehicles, cut open the lock on the rear doors, and loot. Pick an isolated stretch of toad, and the pirates will be gone before anyone can respond.
Getting a 40ton truck isn't hard, and those are very difficult to shield against. Most deployments don't resist them.
There are better ways, just look at military anti-tank bollards. Those will stop a truck, and archive what you want. They are also not as temporary, usually.
My understanding is that more extreme measures like this aren’t possible because the city has been left to deal with it, and all they have are towing trucks and towing contractors. The federal government would have to step in to make tanks or other heavy equipment available.
But at the point a commercial of licensed vehicle is illegally blocking downtown traffic for days, if they want to make it hard to remove there is no reason to gently remove the truck. Hell they can get a few acetylene torches and just start cutting.
What makes you think they would be easier to hijack?
Part of the ease of hijacking truck is that you can drive off with it. What if the trailer locks its wheels and bricks itself, if it determines it's being hijacked, all while recording 360 video and sending immediate alerts to management and law enforcement?
Certainly better than a driver afraid for his life.
tl;dr version - Naive "tow all the trucks away" ideas are ~useless in the real world, because towing just one heavy truck out of a tight spot, when the driver is friendly, is very difficult and laborious. At scale, against hostile truck drivers, when the tow truck drivers are (as a social group) quite close to them? Hahahaha. There would be plenty of easy solutions, if the Canadian government was comfortable with Evil Dictator tactics - but for some reason(s) it is not...
Dropping caltrops on a secondary road at night would also work. Rigging a drone to drop chaff on a freeway, etc, would also get the perpetrator physically away from the action. Really, with some creativity, surprisingly crude attacks can shut down a road with minimal exposure of the perp.
A decade ago, the Beltway Sniper terrorized my neighborhood for two weeks. It turned out to be a teenage boy and a certifiably insane adult with some military training. A similar attack by someone who actually knew what they were doing and who wasn't addled would have been very, very difficult to catch. Much less if the attack were, say, from wooded roadsides that overlooked interstates.
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