There is another question with this same title, but the question is asked differently than what's troubling me, and the answer is not sufficient.
The most prominent analogies I hear to explain bandwidth are the highway example, and the pipe example. In the highway example, bandwidth is the amount of cars that can drive on the highway in a given amount of time, and in the pipe its an amount of water that can flow through.
My question is - by measuring by cars per second, or liters per second, does that mean that a longer highway, pipe or copper wire has a higher bandwidth than a shorter one? That seems strange to me.
Wouldn't it make more sense to give the highway bandwidth as the amount of lanes it has - irrespective of a unit of time? It just makes more sense to me and is simpler to say that the pipe is "1 foot in diameter" rather than "it carries 100 litres per second".
Why do we measure bandwidth in bits per second and not just in bits?
"My question is - by measuring by cars per second, or liters per second, does that mean that a longer highway, pipe or copper wire has a higher bandwidth than a shorter one?"
No!
Bandwidth is not about how many cars can fit on the road. It's about how many cars can pass a point on the road during a certain time. How many cars per second can pass under a bridge, for example.