Christa Sys was elected Multimodal Ambassador 2025 yesterday during the ‘Pionebreakers’ event of VIL, the Flemish Institute of Logistics. The professor of Transport Economics at the University of Antwerp builds bridges between academia, policy and practice. She holds the BNP Paribas Fortis Chair in Transport, Logistics and Ports. She also heads the Dennie Lockefeer Chair. With her scientific insights and training initiatives, she inspires a new generation of logistics professionals.
She beat two other nominees: Hanno Reeser, Strategic expert packed transport from H.Essers, and Ben Beirnaert, General Manager of Combinant.
We asked the new ‘ambassador’ what the state of multimodality is in Flanders and whether transport companies are sufficiently committed to it today.
“There are two opinions about multimodality,” she answers. “One opinion says: it is dead. That was shocking to me when I heard that. And the other says: ‘fully alive’. Today we see on these ‘Pionebreakers’ that it is absolutely not dead. There is certainly a future for multimodality and now, as a brand new ambassador, I will further support this. The sector is partly concerned with multimodality, especially the ‘believers’. They really go for multimodality, for the transition to alternative modes. inland shipping and rail, for CO₂ reduction, but in each case we have also heard what cost savings they have achieved. But what we need to focus on is getting those non-believers here too. Too many companies still see this as difficult, difficult or expensive, while that is actually not the case, and there are a growing number of cases that demonstrate this.”
