  We present an alternative to Polyakov's induced action for the noncritical
string. Our Yang-Mills like action is both local and invariant under coordinate
transformations. It defines a teleparallel theory of gravity with interesting
links to Horava-Lifshitz and Einstein-aether theories. It is of Liouville type
in the conformal gauge while, remarkably, in the proper-time gauge it gives an
effective action familiar from the Causal Dynamical Triangulation (CDT)
approach to 2d quantum gravity. In the latter gauge the effective action is
especially interesting since its quantization is known to reduce to a quantum
mechanical model.
