- One word to describe yourself: Dependable
- Alma Mater: Washington University in St. Louis and University of Maryland, College Park
- Favorite hobby(ies): CrossFit, traveling and cooking
Aaron T.C.Y. Kozuki, a consulting manager at AECOM, has 10 years of experience specializing in the areas of transit asset management, activity-based cost financial modeling, financial planning, management analysis, and regional/statewide transportation planning. Over the last decade, he has been committed to serving transit and intercity rail agencies across North America, such as Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Metra, TransLink, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Regional Transportation District, and Amtrak in their planning efforts. He demonstrates tenacious focus on client service while leading or managing various aspects of his work.
Kozuki supported the Northeast Corridor Commission in complying with the evolving policy governed by the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act (PRIIA) Section 212 regarding the allocation of costs on Amtrak — and commuter railroad-owned infrastructure assets among the operators using those assets. He led the development of a cost-based allocation model that identifies the appropriate shared-infrastructure costs and allows for flexibility in allocating costs and revenues to the various infrastructure users through the assignment of varying level of service statistics.
Kozuki has also supported various transit agencies in addressing asset management needs through state-of-good repair analyses. He has helped agencies assemble the asset inventory and applied a decision-support tool to identify the current backlog, the future capital investment needs, and determine what happens to the backlog and asset condition when there isn’t enough funding to address the needs. These state-of-good repair analyses have been used to address capital investment planning in New Starts Financial Plans, to enable agencies to successfully articulate the need for additional capital funding, and to help agencies meet the Federal Transit Administration's TAM requirements.
Kozuki’s other professional experience includes developing activity-based operations and maintenance cost models; developing cost allocation tools for policy evaluation; developing and applying cost allocation and management allocation tools to determine a basis for pricing services; using travel demand models to produce transit ridership and revenue forecasts; developing models and tools to evaluate different transportation policies; and analyzing macro-economic relationships with traffic growth.
Outside of work, Kozuki pursues his passion for physical fitness and serves as a CrossFit trainer at his local gym. He is actively involved in his college fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, training the next generation of student leaders as the lead advisor for the University of Maryland, College Park chapter, and cultivating the fraternal bonds amongst alumni as the president of the Washington Beta Theta Pi Alumni Association.
"I really like helping people solve their analytical problems, that is one of the signature things that I do for them: creating analytical tools from scratch that solves their problems. I also like working with the different agencies, because they may start off with the same problem or the same approach, but there is always a different solution that gets implemented because each agency is different. I like that, that is the challenging aspect of it, but it is also allows me to learn and share some of the best practices in the industry."
"I think that with a lot of things that I do it gets very political, without me intending it to be. Whether it is within the agency that I am working with, or sometimes it becomes an internal politic within my company, there is just that little nuance especially with some of things that are financial with financial implications and impacts. They defiantly get a lot of sensitive information and therefore you have people actually get to where things end up."
"It's really the development of the analytical tool that is used to support the implementation of the qualification policy to the satisfy their requirements for the section 2:12 so that would be the biggest accomplishment for my career so far."
