What is the best way to get around Las Vegas?

Walk the dense center of the Strip and ride for everything else: free trams for the resort clusters, the Monorail along the east side, the Deuce bus for the long haul, rideshare late at night. You only need a car if you are leaving town.

Judge distance by time, not by the map. The Strip is 4.2 miles end to end and the resorts are enormous, so a casino "across the street" can be a 20-minute walk once you add the pedestrian bridges. Between Park MGM and The Venetian, walking wins.

Your options

• Free trams: Mandalay Bay to Luxor to Excalibur, and Bellagio to CityCenter to Park MGM. Air-conditioned, no ticket. The Mirage to Treasure Island tram is parked until the Hard Rock rebuild opens.
• Monorail: seven east-side stations from MGM Grand to Sahara, every 4 to 8 minutes, $5.50 a ride online or $13.45 for 24 hours. Skips traffic on show nights; the stations are at the back of the casinos.
• Deuce bus: 24 hours along the whole Strip and on to Downtown, $8 for a 24-hour pass. Cheapest way to cover everything, slow in evening traffic.
• Rideshare and taxis: best late at night and for the airport, with surge pricing after big events; the airport taxi fare is a flat $21 to $29 by zone.
• Vegas Loop: the tunnel Teslas. Mostly a Convention Center thing, with a few paid stations at Resorts World, Westgate, Encore and Sahara; not a Strip-wide system yet.
• A car: only for Red Rock, Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon or an off-Strip hotel. Parking is $20 to $25 a day and the Boulevard crawls at night.

The airport leg and the rest are in getting around Las Vegas; the rent-or-not decision in do you need a car.