Car crashes? impaired driving something along those lines <span />
There are several different reasons depending on the perspective you look at it.
If you're looking at it from the government perspective, then this was due to the fact that they wanted to get rid of the tradition and have a complete take over of the culture by getting rid of it.
Other explanations are that they wanted to switch an alphabet or genuinely wanted to simplify the actual characters.
Hope this helps!
