On the early morning of Jan. 8, a UW student left her dorm to move her car from an on-campus parking spot to the street. Like many other students, she had made a habit of moving her car each day. But on this morning, she didn’t just move her car and head back to her dorm. She was attacked and brutally beaten by a would-be carjacker, and is still recovering from the attack.

Her story seems unusual — a one-time event or a fluke. But it’s more likely than any of us would like to admit.

Many students, unable to afford on-campus parking, take advantage of free on-campus parking between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. and move their car off campus each morning.

The $11 per day parking fee on campus means it costs more than $500 per quarter for students to park near their homes. To a student, $500 can mean a month’s rent. It can mean three, four, or even five textbooks. It’s half of an airline ticket to study abroad. Yet, just to keep our cars near our dorms, we have to sacrifice all of these things. So, instead, we set our alarms for 6 a.m., trudge outside in our pajamas and drive half a mile to save $11. And it’s more than inconvinient.

This terrible event sheds light on one very serious issue: Students can’t afford to be safe.

Although the UW provides safety services like NightWalk and Nightride (which only run until 2:30 a.m.), some other basic measures could be utilized to improve student safety — namely, lowering parking prices so we can park on campus — or at least using the money to improve safety measures. If we can’t afford to park on campus, we should at least have the chance to be safe on and around campus.

Safety services should be funded to operate through the night. Although our 24-hour undergraduate library is constantly full of students, our safety services only operate between 8 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. The E-1 parking lot is closed for several hours each night, requiring students to shuffle their cars at late hours. Overnight passes should be issued to students who have nowhere else to park their cars in the evening. The officers who ticket cars parked overnight in this lot could instead be redeployed to escort students home from their vehicles or from other locations on campus. It comes down to this: Is the priority to enforce parking rules or to keep students safe?

Many efforts have been made, especially recently, to improve campus safety and we appreciate them. But let’s start with the simple things, like a 24-hour police escort service for students.

Some might say this is unduly expensive, but what can we afford if not safety?